why if a satalite can spot a sock in the desert can one not find the spaceship that landed on the moon?

Answer 1

..because the satellites you refer to are orbiting the earth, not the moon. They are relatively close to the sock in the desert, but thousands of miles from the spaceship on the moon.

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Answer 2

The satellite that can (supposedly) find a sock in the desert -- or rather show a single pixel of a contrasting colour without telling you that it is a sock) is approximately 200 km above the desert.

The same satellite is still 380,000 km from the Moon. Therefore, the sock would have to be 2000 times longer (and 2000 times larger = 4 million times the area) to show up on that same camera.

Plus, the camera would have to be pointed to the Moon instead of the desert.

We do have space telescopes. They are engaged in scientific research and too busy to look at the Moon. Even if we wanted them to look, most of them cannot look at the Moon because:
1) The Moon is too close (the telescopes have limited focussing abilities and they are set for 'infinite' distances), and
2) the Moon is too bright (many telescopes are set for faint objects and they would be overwhelmed by the light from the Moon -- when the Moon's side facing us is dark, then the Moon is too close to the Sun, making the problem even worse).

3) Many telescopes are set to take specific data (not necessarily as 'pictures' but, for example, as distribution of light per frequency). For example, MOST is set to measure fast variations in the light output of a star; it does not actually take a picture of the star, it just measures the light intensity.

4) The latest lunar mapping efforts (Clementine) were done with cameras set to detect colour differences over large areas for geological purposes (not to find small objects).

For example, the so-called 'high-resolution' camera had an aperture of 131 mm (5 inches) which gives it a resolution of 0.88" in visible light. At a distance of 230 km from the lunar surface, it could theoretically detect an object as small as 1 m.

However, this camera did not sweep the entire surface of the Moon. That was done with the other cameras, for example, the UV and visible light CCD camera, with an aperture of 46 mm (less than 2 inches). The cameras were set to sweep 40 km wide from an altitude of 400 km. The resolution would then have been 2.5"
An object measuring 5 m would appear as a single dot on that camera's image.

Keep in mind that the purpose was large scale geological surveys, not finding a sock on the Moon.

Answer 3

Angular diameter is the answer. The satellite is only 250 miles above the sock. The moon and the spacecraft from 1969 is 225,000 miles from earth and the satellite. The sock is relatively bigger in angle than the spaceship on the Moon.

Answer 4

The reason is that it's simply to small to be seen (even with hubble). It would be like trying to read a book that was 30 miles away with some binoculars! It can be shown that it can't be seen with a little maths:

Let's say the largest object on the moon was 5 metres in diameter, I picked 5 because it's a nice round number! The distance to the moon is roughly 384,000 kilometres.

Angular Size = 5 / 384,000,000 = 13 billionths of a Radian

To convert from from Radians to degrees:

In degrees = (1.3 x 10-8) x 180 / Pi = 750 billionths of a degree across

Ok, so we've obtained in degrees the area that we would have to look at to be able to see that particular object, now I will tie this into hubble.

Astronomers use 'arcseconds' instead of degrees. There are 3600 arc seconds in a degree. If we do the maths 750 billionths of a degree x 3600 we get around 0.0026 arc seconds, but because we approximated with the distance I'll round this upto 0.003 arcseconds.

So, I hear you ask? What can hubble see? Our eye can see 60 arcseconds, The best telescope on the ground can see objects 0.5 arcseconds in size, hubble can see more clearly, upto 0.05 arcseconds in size. That makes the moon landing equipment 18 times smaller than what hubble can see. Even if it was 18 times bigger it would resolve to one pixel, to put that in perspective you probably have about 800 thousand pixels on your monitor right now!

Now then, that isn't the only problem! The moon is moving across the sky at 0.5 arcseconds due to it's orbit around earth, you can probably see the problem all ready! It would be like trying to take a sharp picture of a train whizzing by!

I hope this answers your questions,

Gav

Answer 5

What are you talking about? We don't have satellites orbiting the moon, they are orbiting the Earth well below the moon.

And what spaceship do you mean? Has one been lost? The spaceships that landed on the moon in the 1970s took off again with the astronauts inside.

Answer 6

why if we have grammar books can one not write a proper sentence?

If we had a spy satellite in low orbit around the moon then we likely could see the lunar landers (parts of them were left behind on the moon, most notably the lunar rover). but we don't have such a satellite over the moon.

we do have hubble but its not supposed to look at the moon (the moon is too bright it could damage the cameras). even hubble doesn't have the resolution for that though.

Answer 7

Because the pictures you see on Google Earth, or whatever, are taken from satellites that are orbiting the earth, not the moon. If a similar satellite was in lunar orbit, you would be able to see most of the big stuff we left there.

Answer 8

Simple: The satalites are orbiting the earth, not the moon and the camera point to earth.

Answer 9

what religion does a satalite come from?

why is spotting a sock in the desert remarkable?

which spaceship that landed on the moon that is untraceable are your referring to ?

Answer 10

They can find the spaceship on the moon. If you go to the NASA site you will find some Hubble photos of lunar landers on there taken by Hubble.