Are footprints and other evidence of the Lunar Landing visible from Earth?

Question

Here's a similar forum topic:
http://uplink.space.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=sciastro&Number=4629&page=3&view=collapsed&sb=6&o=0&fpart=all

Regarding conspiracies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_moon_landing_hoax_accusations
http://experts.about.com/e/a/ap/Apollo_moon_landing_hoax_accusations.htm

If someone could look through a telescope and see evidence of the lunar landing, all conspiracy theorists could be ignored.

I did not know about the Lunar laser mirror left by Apollo 11. If this mirror did exist on the moon as of the Moon landing, this would be the best evidence as long as it could have only been installed by human beings walking on the surface.

I just found this link about the reflector left by the Apollo 11 crew:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/21jul_llr.htm

Here's a telescope called the Very Large Telescope (VLT) that was supposed to be able to see the landings. I can't find any articles since:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/24/1037697982142.html

Answer 1

You can see the landing crafts and some of the equipment with telescopes but not the footprints. In fact one of the things left up there was a special mirror that laser beams are bounced off all the time.

Answer 2

The Clementine lunar satellite was able to take a picture of the Apollo 15 landing site, but the resolution was too low (100 meters) to be considered overwhelming evidence; the article's provided in the link below.

The Indian space program plans to send a remote sensing spacecraft in 2007, called Chandrayaan I, which has a five meter resolution. Assuming the craft is successful, its images should provide definitive evidence that the moon landings were real.

Answer 3

They are not. I am not skeptical of the moon landings, but in Parade magazine, under "ask marilyn" someone asked if the hubble space telescope, which is in outer space, would be able to see the flag. The response said that the hubble space telescope would only be able to see the size of a football field on the moon, and, therefore, it would not be possible to see the evidence from earth.

Answer 4

No because ground-based telescopes cannot resolve such small objects on the surface of the Moon. Neither can Hubble, as its mirror is designed to gather light from millions of miles not thousands.

There is simply no way to take pictures of the objects on the Moon. We are going back however with the new Ares program, so maybe we'll get some pictures of it then if we decided to land in the Sea of Traquility or one of the other landing site areas.

Answer 5

There are several mirrors on the surface of the moon that we occasionally bounce lasers off to measure the moon's distance. In addition, the astronauts left one or two other short lived transmitters that were used to measure solar radiation and magnetic fields and send the data back to earth, but those have long run their batteries dead.

Answer 6

Yes. You can see a bunch of Moon rocks in various museums around the world. You can also meet some of the men who walked on the Moon and ask them yourself about their trips, if you're willing to make the effort.

Answer 7

It is impossible to see details of the moon from earth with the naked eye. with a telescope though you can see more. footprints, etc will only be visible by telescopes like hubble.

Answer 8

no, they are too small.

It seems like they would be as we can see galaxies millions of light years away with the hubble telescope, but these are millions of lightyears wide themselves, which make them proportionally larger than landing gear and footprints from our point of view

They arent even visible through Hubble.

Answer 9

On Earth yes, you can see it on Hollywood Studio, But i don't think it can be seen on moon.

Answer 10

Yes if you squint really hard and your vision is like 20/1,000,000