With all the telescopes etc we have now, how is it that nobody has ever taken a picture of the moon to show the old Moon rockets and vehicles that were left on the moon after the moon landings of the 1960's to show we actually went there and that they are still there??
2006-12-06 23:46:20 · 26 answers · asked by splandastic 3 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Astronomy & Space
Yes but why has nobody ever taken a picture from the earth, using a telescope or something, of the stuff we left behind. Surely it is still there???
2006-12-06 23:51:45 · update #1
I'll say again........Why has nobody ever taken a picture from the earth to show the stuff we left behind. Surely that would be proof enough?!?!?
2006-12-06 23:55:45 · update #2
Yes we did. As for pictures taken from the earth. The moon is the size of North America. We don't have any telescopes that can pinpoint something the size of the materials we left behind at a distance of 100,000 miles.... We may be able to see pictures of license plates now from satellites in orbit but those satellites are only 50 to 100 miles away... Try multiplying that by a thousand or more....
Correction: 240,000 miles away..... Even smaller trying to pick up that kind of detail.
2006-12-06 23:59:00 · answer #1 · answered by Andy FF1,2,CrTr,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 5 · 7⤊ 2⤋
Yes we did go.
it is impossible to resolve an object a couple of square metres from this distance, even with our best optical telescopes. It may be possible to reposition the hubble telescope, but why should sane people want do that for the benefit of a few nutters.
the sort of people who believe that the moon landing was a hoax, are the sort of idiots who can confidently state "there is no gravity on the moon" or who believe that the only reaon that nasa wouldn't take a highly flammable material, and an ignition source onto a spacecraft was because it might tip people off.
At the time, i dont think nasa was worrying about what stories a few nutcases might make up many years later.
Get over it we went. all the 'so called' inconsistancies have been explained.
there is a laser reflector that was left on the moon,. which is CONSTANTLY in use to measure the distance from the earth to the moon
Russian was a superpower in competition with the USA, They were closely watching the USA/NASA....it was a space race...if there had been the slightest doubt, they would have been all over the media with it.
Get over it. either examine the real evidence or STFU
2006-12-07 08:43:17 · answer #2 · answered by Vinni and beer 7 · 3⤊ 1⤋
There is no telescope big enough to resolve an object so small as the lunar lander. If you are more curious study some basic optics to understand how you calculate the resolving capabilities of a telescope and you will be able to answer the question yourself.
I will give you an idea and I hope you understand it. I will make it as simple as possible.
A telescope's diffraction limited resolving power depends linearly on the aperture of the telescope. Groundbased telescopes also have to look through the murky and turbulant atmosphere so without corrective techniques that are just now becoming common in large telescopes (called adaptive optics), a telescopes resolution is limited by the atmosphere to about 0.5-1.0 arcseconds (3600 arcseconds are in one degree and 360 degrees around the whole sky). That limits groundbased telescopes to a resolution of about 2 kilometers on the moon. From space, a telescope is limited by its diffraction limited resolution. For the Hubble Space Telescope, that is a little less than 0.05 arcseconds or about 90 meters at the distance of the moon. To resolve the LM descent stage which is about 10 meters across, one would need to have a resolution better than 10 meters, perhaps 2-3 meters which means we need a telescope some 30 times larger than the HST in orbit around the Earth to resolve the largest equipment left on the moon.
2006-12-07 10:08:00 · answer #3 · answered by Sporadic 3 · 4⤊ 1⤋
No, we brought it down here, had a good look and put it back. Of course people went to the Moon. Most telescopes cannot see the bibs and bobs on the Moon because they are too small. Even the very large telescopes like Keck are probably incapable of it.
Even if the largest telescopes could see it, large astronomical telescope time is booked out years in advance. Astronomers are not going to use valuable telescope time to take pictures of what they know is there just to "satisfy" some conspiracy theorists who would immediately cook up some story about the telescope pictures being faked. They are no different from the morons and frauds who promote biblical creationism and "intelligent design"....
However directing a powerful laser at the Moon produces a reflection from a corner reflector (similar to a car reflector but much more efficient and larger) which was left there by one of the Apollo teams.
2006-12-07 08:03:29 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 9⤊ 2⤋
1) Twelve 12 American astronauts have walked on the moon.
Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin
Apollo 12: Pete Conrad & Alan Bean
Apollo 13: << failed to land on the moon >>
Apollo 14: Alan Shepard & Edgar (Ed) Mitchell
Apollo 15: David Scott & James Irwin
Apollo 16: John Young & Charles Duke
Apollo 17: Eugene (Gene) Cernan & Harrison Schmidt
2) Why haven't we been back?
a) American astronauts visited the moon on six occasions.
b) The "moon race" was an extension of the cold war. It was mostly about national prestige. We got there first and achieved our primary objective. There was some good science: surveys, measurements, sample collection. But it was mostly about being there first. Once we achieved our primary objective, there was no political will to go back. There still isn't. Perhaps, if we discover He3 or something else valuable, there will be.
c) I used to travel to Crested Butte, Colorado every year to ski. Because I don't go anymore, does it mean that I never went?
3) What about the Van Allen radiation belts? Wouldn't it have killed the astronauts?
The existence of the Van Allen radiation belts postulated in the 1940s by Nicholas Christofilos. Their existence was confirmed in *1958* by the Explorer I satellite launched by the USA.
The radiation in the Van Allen radiation belts is not particularly strong. You would have to hang out there for a week or so in order to get radiation sickness. And, because the radiation is not particularly strong, a few millimeters of metal is all that is required for protection. "An object satellite shielded by 3 mm of aluminum will receive about 2500 rem (25 Sv) per *year*."
"In practice, Apollo astronauts who travelled to the moon spent very little time in the belts and received a harmless dose. [6]. Nevertheless NASA deliberately timed Apollo launches, and used lunar transfer orbits that only skirted the edge of the belt over the equator to minimise the radiation." When the astronauts returned to Earth, their dosimeters showed that they had received about as much radiation as a couple of medical X-rays.
4) The U.S. government scammed everyone?
In 1972, there was a politically motivated burglary of a hotel room in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. There were only about six or eight people who knew about it. However, those people, including Richard M. Nixon, the President of the United States, failed to keep that burglary a secret. It exploded into a scandal that drove the President and a number of others from office.
If six or eight people couldn't keep a hotel room burglary a secret, then how could literally thousands of people could have kept their mouths shut about six faked moon landings? Not just one moon landing, but six of them!
5) What about the USSR?
Even if NASA and other government agencies could have faked the six moon landings well enough to fool the general public, they could NOT have fooled the space agency or military intelligence types in the USSR. The Soviets were just dying to beat us. If the landings were faked, the Soviets would have re-engineered their N-1 booster and landed on the moon just to prove what liars Americans are. Why didn't they? Because the landings were real and the Soviets knew it.
6) Why does the flag shake? Where are the stars? Who took the video of Neil Armstrong?
Take a look at the first two websites listed below. They deal well with all of the technical questions.
7) Finally, please tell us what you would accept as definitive evidence that the six moon landings were real. Is there anything?
2006-12-07 07:51:29 · answer #5 · answered by Otis F 7 · 8⤊ 3⤋
There are plans to build an outpost on the moon. The flag and all the bits will be shown still in place then. I wonder who will be the first to say they haven't really built an outpost, it is just another hoax? It will probably be in the next few years so watch this space. Of course the Americans landed on the Moon. The whole world witnessed it and to be quite honest it irritates slightly when people keep coming on answers and ask the same old silly question. What so the Americans just said one day, " Lets send a man to the moon but not really, wink wink " and then they fooled the world.
2006-12-07 08:08:55 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 8⤊ 1⤋
Most scientists are surprised and appalled when they hear about this whole "Moon Hoax" notion. The idea seems to be spread by a few cranks and conspiracy theorists who (like most conspiracy theorists) have fixed on a strange idea and will not be convinced by any argument or any amount of evidence that they are wrong. And they sure don't mind making some money off of books, videos and television programs that claim we never went to the Moon.
To anyone who works in the field of planetary science, it is quite obvious that the Apollo astronauts did indeed walk on the Moon. We have rocks and soil samples from the Moon that have been analyzed by several independent laboratories--including labs in the former Soviet Union! It is unlikely that they were all tricked or bribed or threatened into silence. We have many images taken by the astronauts that have been analyzed and re-analyzed for their scientific content. If it's so obvious that these photos are faked, could all the scientists who examined these photographs be in on the conspiracy, or dupes of it?
Many people were exposed to the "moon hoax" idea when the Fox television network aired a program titled, "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" that presented the "moon hoax" very sympathetically, and did not offer scientists much time to refute the conspiracy theorist's claims.
Scientists are very upset about this program. It had a lot of scientific errors in it, of course, and because the program focused on the conspiracy theorist's point of view, the audience didn't get to hear the scientific explanations, so it seems to have convinced a lot of people, and caused a lot more to be doubtful. The program also implied that many, many scientists are either in on the conspiracy (that is, they were lying to their colleagues and the public, the opposite of what a good scientist does!), or have been tricked by it (that is, they were too stupid to tell an Arizona sound stage from the surface of the Moon!)
But the most shocking and awful thing about the program was that it suggested that, to prevent an astronaut from talking to the press about the "hoax," NASA deliberately set the fire in the Apollo 1 capsule that killed three American astronauts: Roger Chaffee, Ed White, and Gus Grissom.
This is a very upsetting accusation. The NASA engineers, astronauts and scientists working on the Apollo program were America's finest, all dedicated to the goal set by John F. Kennedy: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth." For the people who worked on the Apollo program, the safety and success of the mission were of the greatest importance, and Apollo 1 was a tragedy, a terrible accident that weighs on the soul of everyone who was connected to it.
To suggest that it was intentional is beneath contempt, and does a terrible disservice to the brave astronauts who died.
2006-12-07 07:49:07 · answer #7 · answered by Al 6 · 11⤊ 4⤋
I think there are too many nutters out there. It's rather expensive to use telescopes that are meant to look at far stars to go and find the moon landing spot just to shut up a bunch of loosers who think that everything is a conspiracy..
2006-12-07 08:09:16 · answer #8 · answered by XX 6 · 6⤊ 2⤋
Why didn't the astronauts take magnesium to ignite on the moon? It had been theorised long before the moon launch that even the moon's atmosphere would be sufficient to burn magnesium which would give off a light bright enough to that the moon landing could be seen through a normal telescope.
Yet NASA refused... for some reason... hmm...
2006-12-07 08:02:07 · answer #9 · answered by monkeymanelvis 7 · 4⤊ 6⤋
It does't take a NASA scientist to realise that some kind of light emitting object could easily have been left on the moon surface that would have been extremely visible from earth, for some considerable time.
So, along with fluttering flags, DUST FREE spacecraft surfaces, and hollywood lighting, you have another interesting conspiracy theory question...
To pre-empt the inevitable "it 's coz it's so dusty up there" answers, read my answer again.....
2006-12-07 08:12:44 · answer #10 · answered by dawn 3 · 2⤊ 7⤋