Do we have a telescope on earth that can see the flag on the moon?

Answer 1

Unfortunately no. Even Hubble resolution, at .1 arcsecond, means that a single pixel is 150 m across (you'd be able to see a baseball statium, but that is about it).

Answer 2

None of the telescopes on Earth are powerful enough to do it. Even the one that might be suggested is the HST - The Hubble Space Telescope. But even the Hubble can not resolve an area on the Moon smaller than about 100 yards.

Anyway, it is in such demand that finding time to look for souvenir pictures is probably out of the question. There would be no scientific use for such a picture even if there was a reason to look.

;-D The Hubble is fantastic!

PS. The CIA probably has one! hahaha But it is checking out the license plate on your car RIGHT NOW! You are double parked!

From: NASA
For a telescope with a circular collecting area of diameter D (2.4 m for Hubble), the smallest feature that one can resolve at wavelength L (550 x 10^-9 m for visible light) is given roughly by:

resolution = 1.4 L/D = 3.2 x 10^-7 radians

This estimate gives the "diffraction limited" resolution, or the resolution based on light's wave-like characteristics. It is difficult to improve upon this limit.

The distance to the Moon is roughly 240,000 miles. Hubble's resolution corresponds to a physical dimension of size = x = 0.08 miles = 405 feet = 124 meters at the Moon's surface ... roughly the size of a football field.

How far can Hubble resolve a pair of headlights? We can reverse the above
calculation to find out. Let's say that headlights are separated about
1.5 meters. Then we want:

distance = / = 4700 km = 2910 miles

Thus, Hubble can tell that there are two headlights on a car if the car were at a distance comparable to the separation of the East and West coasts of the US. If the car were any farther away than this, the two headlights would appear as a single blob of light - we could still see it, but it is harder to tell that there are two sources of light instead of one.
END QUOTE

The Moon is about 240,000 miles away. This is 100 times farther than New York is from Los Angeles. It would take something 100 times larger than a headlight to be seen by the Hubble as 2 pixels. To resolve recognizable artifacts you need enough resolution to make the flag at least 5 pixels wide. So you would need a much more powerful telescope than even the HST.

PPS. Another thing to consider is that the Hubble is looking DOWN on the scene, and only the Lander would be wide enough to be seen from above. The flag would be too thin from above.

Answer 3

Nope, no earth-based or space-based telescopes have a high enough resolution to resolve anything we left on the Moon. Even if we did have a good enough telescope, that probably still wouldn't satisfy the silly people who think we never went.

You might be interested to know that the astronauts left little mirrors on the Moon, so that we could shine laser beams to the Moon and see the reflection off those mirrors, and thus be able to accurately and precisely measure the distance from Earth to the Moon. From this we know (among other things) that the Moon is slowly moving away from Earth at a rate of about 4 cm per year.

Answer 4

Do you wanna do the sum? Give me 5 minutes.

The moon is about 400,000 kms away

The flag is say 1 metre long.

That's the same then as looking at an object at 1 kilometre away, that is a 400,000th of a metre

That is an object 2.5 micrometres seen from a distance of 1000 metres

2.5 micrometers would be about 100 times smaller than a full stop on this page. Can you imagine how small that would look seen from 1000 metres (about 2/3 mile).

No telescope could see that, and even the above assumes seeing the flag face on, which of course would not be the case.

Answer 5

Sorry, I don't think so at this point. I've only done limited work with a few observatories, but even objects that are much closer (such as man-made satellites in low-earth orbit) don't end up with very clear results when you're looking for something the size of a flag.

Most of the problem seeing things in space results from blurring as a result of turbulence in the atmosphere. Building bigger telescopes doesn't solve the problem. While there are lots of efforts at observatories to reduce this blurring through complex math, or using deformable mirrors (ones they can change the shape of) to reduce the effects of turbulence, I'm not aware of anyone that has been able to clean up the images enough to be able to see something that size.

Need to get out into space, like the Hubble telescope. :-)

Answer 6

Not yet. Not even hubble telescope (the best) can focus in that size.

I suggest. If America really went to the moon, they should send proof there using some huge flag that can be seen using Hubble telescope. But they didn't.

Answer 7

No, sadly enough we don't. Nor do we have one in space. It's a matter of resolution. And telescopes are meant to resolve things much farther away then our Moon. Also, the flag and landers are so tiny compared to the moon it'd be like trying to find an amoeba on a fly's back.

Answer 8

I imagine the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii can resolve an area 50 square meters or smaller on the moon. Can you see a flag in that? It's quite possible.

Answer 9

No, but there is proof we landed, When they landed on the moon they placed a transmitter on the moon that sends data and it is still working today.

Answer 10

THAT FLAG WAS REMOVED IVE HEARD OR HIT BY A METEOR OR COMET OR ASTEROID