It's true! Try to find one on the web. You can't! Why??? Don't tell me the telescope's can't see that far! Hubble can for sure!
2007-01-04 12:27:07 · 13 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics ➔ Astronomy & Space
The best military spy satellite cameras today are now just about able to resolve foot prints on dirt. And that's from only about 100 miles up. The moon is about 240,000 miles away. The Hubble Telescope, in spite of opinions to the contrary, is not 2,400 times as acute as our best spy cameras. One reason is that resolution is fundamentally limited by the aperture size, so that if the aperture of the spy cameras is about a foot (yes, they're that big), that'd mean the Hubble Telescope would have to be half a mile across to be able to see footprints on the moon.
Now, but not all is lost. ESA's SMART-1 probe, orbiting the moon, is now conducting comprehensive photographic surveys of the surface of the moon, presently at medium resolution, before going to high resolution. It's expected that photographs of the early moon landing sites will be obtained, and presumably released to the public.
2007-01-04 12:44:47 · answer #1 · answered by Scythian1950 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
We should be able to get images of that stuff in the next 4-5 years or so with some orbiters the we and Japan are sending up there. Hubble can't get it because the moon moves too fast for it and isn't set up for things as close as the moon, plus the moon is too bright for it. Hubble is for dimmer things in deep space, not 250,000 miles away, that's like shoving a piece of paper in your face and trying to read it at the end of your nose. We were there, sonny, don't you worry about it. Go ahead and call Neil Armstrong a liar to his face!
2007-01-04 12:41:08 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
The Mars orbiter, only about 100 miles above the surface of Mars, was barely able to take a photo of one of the six-foot-wide rovers. It looked like a dot. The Moon is a quarter million miles away from us. And the Apollo landing sites are all near the center of our view, so we'll be looking straight down, edge on, at these flags. The LEM bases would be an easier target, but not by much.
2016-05-23 04:15:24 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Sorry, you're simply wrong.
With an aperture of 2.4m, the diffraction blur of the Hubble cannot allow the resolution of anything less than about 97 m across.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_telescope
Even with the suggested long baseline telescope with an effective aperture of 300 m, the blur spot would be about 31 inches, which is not enough to see a flag.
As shown in http://www.stsci.edu/instruments/wfpc2/Wfpc2_hand_current/wfpc2_ihb.pdf, the planetary camera's resolution is comparable to the blur spot.
Do the math, 46 milli-arcsec * distance to Moon to get the sampling resolution of Hubble.
2007-01-04 15:18:06 · answer #4 · answered by arbiter007 6 · 0⤊ 1⤋
"Don't tell me the telescope's can't see that far!"
Uhm ... sorry ... the telescopes can't see that far. Sorry, but that's the truth. It's not about seeing "far" ... telescopes can see thing millions of light years away. It's about how small an object you can see at a certain distance.
"Hubble can for sure!"
Nope. Sorry. It can't see things that small.
And what difference would it make to you anyway? If you're the type of person who believes that tens of thousands of NASA engineers, astronauts, technicians, scientists, etc. would perpetrate a massive hoax of the general public ... and have the coordinated ability to maintain this secret for 40 years ... then why wouldn't they have the capacity to fake a few photos?
In other words, if you already believe the "moon-landing hoax" idea, then you're too far gone into La La land to be persuaded by ANY kind of evidence.
Sorry, but it's true.
2007-01-04 13:06:55 · answer #5 · answered by secretsauce 7 · 2⤊ 1⤋
Hubble can't resolve something as small as a flag on the Moon. Nor can it see the other stuff left behind by the six manned Moon missions and the various Russian unmanned missions. The laser reflectors left behind on the Moon can be seen by firing a laser at them from the Earth. They reflect the laser beam back to the Earth.
2007-01-04 12:37:11 · answer #6 · answered by tentofield 7 · 1⤊ 1⤋
To the rest of the very good answers, I'd like to add...
The Keck twins in interferometric mode, at 90m aperture, are pretty close to being able to resolve a lunar lander or rover, but not quite even on a perfect night. The LBT, maybe. I'm wondering if the CHARA array, at an effective aperture of what, about 300m(?) might be able to despite the small size of the individual mirrors?
2007-01-04 13:42:41 · answer #7 · answered by Gary H 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
No, Hubble can't. Hubble can resolve a field on the moon the size of a football field - that means every pixel of the image is the size of a football field. The lander and the flag are MUCH smaller than that, and thus unresolvable.
2007-01-04 12:37:36 · answer #8 · answered by eri 7 · 2⤊ 1⤋
No telescope, no matter how powerful or where it is, can resolve something as small as a flag on a moon or planet or any other object.
2007-01-04 13:01:30 · answer #9 · answered by bldudas 4 · 0⤊ 1⤋
makes sense to you does it?
Hubble pointed at the moon?
kind of overkill wouldn't you say?
2007-01-04 12:34:56 · answer #10 · answered by cork 7 · 1⤊ 1⤋