To prove the moon landing was not a hoax...could they.look at the moon with the Hubble telescope.?

Question

and see if there is any debris there, such as the moon landers, flags, etc....or a land based telescope if one is powerful enough.

Chill out Tham....only asked....seemed a reasonable question to me....but being a normal person, and not one with a brain the size of a planet......

I saw the moon landing live on TV, I believe it happened, I was just wondering how it could be proved beyond doubt to the doubters.....

Answer 1

OK, let's look at this from a technical standpoint.

The largest single item left on the lunar surface is the lunar module descent stage, which measures 4.27m across. The Moon is about 400,000km away. A little trigonometry will show that at that distance the lunar module descent stage subtends an angle of about 0.002 seconds of arc (60 seconds = 1 minute, 60 minutes = 1 degree, the Moon appears to be 0.5 degrees, or 30 minutes of arc, in diameter from Earth).

The Hubble telescope is an optical telescope with an aperture of 2.4m diameter. The limit of resolution of such a telescope is determined by the wavelength of light, and works out to be about 0.06 seconds of arc. That is, it can't separate objects with a distance of less than 0.06 arcseconds between them.

What that means is that it can't separate the lunar surface on either side of the lander, because the lander is too small to offer a resolvable gap in the surface.

(Note that stars can be seen that appear smaller than that, but they are bright objects on a black background. Hubble still could not resolve a double star with a separation of less than 0.06 arcseconds as two stars. It would see them as a single star.)

Galaxies are a different proposition. It is not size that makes galaxies difficult to see without a telescope but their brightness, or lack of it. The whirlpool galaxy, for example, is invisible to the naked eye, but it subtends and angle in the sky of about 11 arcminutes, over third the diameter of the full Moon! Some nebulae actually cover an area much greater than the full Moon, but are too faint to be seen without a telescope. That is why Hubble can take brilliant images of galaxies millions or billions of light years away, but not the lunar landing craft: they are actually visually LARGER than the lunar lander, just too faint to be seen without extended exposures.

Now there is another question beyond resolution: Identification. It is one thing to be able to see there is something there. It is quite another to be able to identify what it is from the image. It is the difference between being able to see there is something there and being able to see what that something actually is. In order to do that you would need an imaging system capable of resolving to less than 1m, preferably only a few centimetres. We do in fact have pictures taken by lunar probes that show something sitting on at least one of the landing sites, but it is just a light blob casting a small shadow. You can't see that it is definitely a lunar module descent stage.

So, we have established that we need a very sophisticated imaging system to take a recognisable picture of the lunar lander on the Moon. The type of imaging systems used on spy satellites may well be up to the job (but don't get confused between images you see from satellites and aerial photography), but only from lunar orbit, and they are huge, heavy, and require the largest launch vehicles just to get them into Earth orbit. Getting one to the Moon would be phenomenally expensive, and you'd need a much better justification than taking pictures of the lunar modules just to prove we went there nearly forty years ago.

But all that misses one vital point: the people who claim it was all faked and that such a set of new pictures would prove it already discount thousands upon thousands of photographs, hours and hours of film and video, pages and pages of documentation, and the personal testimonies of hundreds or thousands of individuals involved at the time. How are a dozen new pictures going to convince them? They're not, partly because at least some of them have a vested interest in perpetuating the hoax claims, and partly because anyone who can already dismiss such a vast amount of material as supports Apollo will not be swayed by a new set of pictures.

We went to the Moon in 1969, and the evidence available is already more than enough to support that assertion. New pictures wil be a lot of expense for no benefit.

Answer 2

The Hubble is never pointed at the Moon because it would fry the cameras. Remember, it can see things up to 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 times dimmer than the Moon (44 magnitudes). No kidding. Next, the things people left on the Moon are so tiny compared to their distance (<=0.01 arc-sec) that they're next to impossible to see. Remember, the Moon is a PLANET. It's so big that if it were going around the Sun rather than Earth it'd be a planet. Do you ever look at a globe and think, I can see tool sheds and people!? The Hubble can only see such faraway galaxies because they have the brightness of billions upon billions of billions of stars! That's at least a sextillion times brighter than the moon. Despite these limitations, I think I once saw in Sky & Telescope magazine the only man-made object on Moon visible from Earth. They used a huge telescope, and probably an extremely short exposure, and they had to know exactly where it was to even find the dang thing. But it showed one of the Apollo landers. It looks like a tiny black speck of sand that becomes a fuzzy gray blob in the magnified inset. That's it, that's all you can see. That's not even the lander, but it's long shadow in the low sun. It's so borderline in fact that the other 5 Apollo landers are impossible to be seen. The exposure had to be really short (measured in microseconds) or otherwise the picture would be blurry and even blind the camera. Lastly, I've seen the Flat Earth Society website, even if they *could* take really nice pictures that show more than a dot then all the paranoid hard-core conspiracists will immediately cry Fake and it would do nothing to convince such deludeds. You have to be kindof kooky already to believe |everything's| a conspiracy.

Answer 3

No. The most powerful telescope has a digital camera attached and when pointed at the moon, each pixel is the size of a football field. So, you can't resolve anything smaller than that - like a flag or lander.

But there's no reason to do it anyway. NASA has provided ample proof of the moon landings, which leaves only conspiracy theorists with poor understandings of physics and astronomy to disbelieve them. Besides, nothing would convince these people that we actually landed - nothing. So there's no reason to waste the last moments of Hubble.

Answer 4

I think it's a legitimate question. Someone said it's impossible to create a telescope with that kind of resolution. So- spy satellites today can identify particular individuals on the ground on earth, and that's through a thick atmosphere. It would stand to reason that a similar satellite could find artifacts the Apollo missions left on the moon, considering it has no permanent atmosphere. So, while maybe the Hubble can't do it, it shouldn't be impossible.

Answer 5

The Hubble captured images of the Moon in 1999:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1999/14/image/
The moon landings are a reality. Someone started the ridiculous claim that it was staged and it spread. They really happened.

Answer 6

No. The Hubble telescope would need to be at least 10 times bigger to resolve detail that small on the Moon.

Answer 7

Even the Hubble Space Telescope can't 'see' things on the moon smaller than 280 feet in diameter. Nothing we've left on the lunar surface is large enough.

Answer 8

Although it is possible to see quite small objects on the earth, with spy satellites or whatever, they are being photographed from only a couple of hundred miles away. The moon is a thousand times further away, so you would expect the smallest object you can see there to be a thousand times the size.

Answer 9

it is a reasonable question. but yeah hubble can't see things that small. if you want to see why we did land on the moon go to badastronomy.com he does a very good job debunking all the crazy "moon landing was a hoax" ideas.

Answer 10

Actually, there is one pretty good way to prove it:

When astronauts landed on the moon, they planted a mirror on it to reflect light back to a laser fired from earth, to tell how far away the moon is and how quickly it's drifting away from earth. It was called the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment

And, it can be seen from earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_Experiment