Theoretically Speaking - Will an Earth Based Telescope ever be able to resolve the Moon Landings?

Factual Questions
1

I have a couple of friends who are a little out there in “Tin Foil Hat Land” and believe a myriad of conspiracy theories including those surrounding JFK, 9/11 and of course the moon landings. Of course they are not alone but the whole “Apollo Hoax” really gets under my skin because unlike JFK and 9/11, there is “absolute proof” sitting approximately 235,000 miles from us right now!

But suffice it to say that no matter how many NASA pictures are shared, until such time that the Astronomy community can use earth based telescopes to see Tranquility base for themselves, these outlandish claims will continue to be made. So I ask… in 10, 50 or even 100 years will technology, specific to imaging advance far enough that an earth based telescope could ever be made to clearly image the Apollo landings?

Please note I do NOT mean to ask if little Johnny can ever walk into Walmart and buy a scope that powerful. But could private universities and other public sector institutions ever possess such a telescope and most importantly, is it even theoretically possible given the degradation that comes from the earth’s atmosphere.

Thanks!

2

I have no idea whether it’s feasible or not, but I can’t help wonder “why?”.

3

Why not or why do it?

Well the latter is an easy answer. Obviously advancing technology and optics to the point where this would be possible would have far reaching impacts, none relating to resolving the moon landings.

Practically EVERYTHING NASA does involves optics, look at the pictures from the Viking mission in 1976 and compare them with the Mars images we have seen in the last decade.

Next to propulsion, optics might be the most important facet of technology in use for space exploration. So IMO the science implications are enormous, seeing Tranquility base would just be a cool by product.

4

You’d be trying to see an object 4 meters across at a distance of about 380,000,000 meters.
At that distance the angle subtended by the LEM is somewhere around 6.0e-7 degrees. That is ridiculously small.

5

Dilemma: assuming we can’t see them now, with the best telescopes, won’t the more advanced telescope be only available to universities, or housed at a NASA facility itself? So how will this help the Lunar Landing Debunk crowd? Even if we brought them to the facility, and had them peer through the eyepiece, wouldn’t they say either, “Well, this certainly gives me another data point to consider, thank you” or immediately claim “You fed a projection, I can tell, from some of the pixels, and having seen many Photoshops before.” What you’re asking for is a home instrument that can resolve the lunar landing site. That may be asking too much.

6

Other than that the landing sites have been viewed from the Hubble and the Lunar Orbiter, but I guess anyone crazy enough to be convinced there is a world wide conspiracy to lie about having landed on the moon is likely to ignore that evidence as just more fraud.

7

this site claims it’s possible, if you’re willing to build a telescope with a lens/mirror 100 meters in diameter. This does not consider atmospheric distortion, although that can be compensated for.

Note that the largest telescopes currently in existence are about 10% of that. With adaptive optics it should theoretically be possible to build a telescope right now with a 100-meter mirror, but I doubt we’ll see it happen any time soon; the expense would be enormous.

Bear in mind that any seemingly incontrovertible evidence of the moon landings will be (and so far has been) dismissed as fake by hoax believers. There’s little point in trying to convince them because they refuse to respond to reason, logic and evidence.

8

“Why do it?”

It seems to be a terrible waste of time, efforts and money to build a telescope with the sole purpose of convincing people with a deluded outlook on things that they are wrong.

9

Here is an image taken by the Lunar Recon Orbiter from a distance of about 50Km. Does that help?

10

NASA faked it with help from the Illuminati and Bigfoot.

11

People have already, multiple times, fired ground-based lasers at the moon, and using ground-based detectors, confirmed the presence of reflectors put on the moon by the Apollo landings. So for maybe a broad definition of ‘clearly image’, it has already been done.

Though of course, that’s not going to convince a moon-landing denier. As had been said, if someone didn’t get to a belief using facts and reason, then mere facts and reason won’t get them out of the belief, either.

12

Came here to make this latest point.

I don’t know why OP would believe that a visible-light telescope zoomed in on, say the Apollo 11 landing site, would convince any skeptic. It wouldn’t be hard to fake any image in any telescope sophisticated enough to clearly resolve human artifacts on the moon; simple optics won’t do for a variety of reasons, and the more complex the telescope, the more susceptible it is to accusations of “camera tricks” and the like.

I suspect the only evidence that would work for a real denier would be seeing the Lander on the Moon’s surface with naked eyes from the Earth’s surface. And that’s impossible. So the denier is essentially safe from evidence and can continue denying.

13

Did you not read my response? Who said anything about building a telescope for the “Sole Purpose” of anything.

The question was one of technology potential/feasibility and as stated is something that would be one of - if not the - normal priorities for space exploration.

14

It would be a limited use device. Something as powerful as that would best be used for deep space exploration, and a ground-based telescope isn’t as efficient as one in space, like the Hubble, which doesn’t need correction for atmospheric effects and is unaffected by weather.

15

Perhaps even mentioning why I thought about this (my dim witted friends) was a bad idea. The question has more to do with “is the technology even possible” than debunking a conspiracy.

The impacts to science exploration are huge and even reading about a 100 meter lens is pretty incredible!

16

100 m mirror, not lens.

17

As others have noted, it wouldn’t matter. The deniers will come up with some excuse, like maybe they are blow-up dolls put there by the Space Shuttle (which, I suppose, would be proof that we got something to the moon).

18

You are going to need a few things to get this to work.

Rayleigh limit on resolution is the first issue. The moon is a very long way away. Looking through the scope means visible light, and the resolution is fundamentally limited by a mix of the diameter of the optics (whether mirror or lens makes no difference) and the wavelength of light.

So, the moon is about 400,00k km away (OK it gets closer, but this will do.) In order to be able to make out the LM is enough detail to convince us that it really is the landing site we probably want to be able to resolve say 400mm. (Resolution isn’t the same as pixel width, as a rough approximation you can relate it to effective pixels of size a bit larger than half the resolution.)
So we need to be able to resolve. arctan(400mm/400,000,000,000mm) = about 1/1,000,000,000 radians.

The Rayleigh limit tells us that the resolution of a telescope is about
R = wavelength/diameter

so the diameter of the telescope needs to be lambda/R.
For visible light, lets take the middle green, although we could go for blue to get some additional resolution. Green is about 500nm. So 500nm * 1,000,000,000 = 500m diameter.

Now that is for pretty nice imaging of the landing site - the LM descent stage would be about 25 pixels across. So better resolution than the lunar orbiter pics, but not a lot. You could play with the resolution to decide how big the optics need to be, but you get the idea.

Atmospheric turbulence will kill you, so at best you will need to stick the telescope up with the rest of the behemoths on Mauna Kea, but even that won’t really solve things. Active image compensation may help, but there is no technology around right now that will get you a telescope of this spec, and probably never will be. It might be cheaper to simply fly to the moon and have a look.

19

I think I already know the answer to this, but why take all of the telescopes in the world and connect them together as an array (along with the appropriate technology for adaptive optics and other tweaks)? The analogy I’m thinking of is the VLA near Pie Town, NM.

20

No, because if you hadn’t done that, all the people in the thread saying your friends are nuts would assume you were nuts yourself and go after you, instead of answering the question.

100 meter mirror, and compensate for atmosphere and track very precisely (when you blow the moon up that big, it’s suddenly moving very fast).

I doubt it will happen, because Hubble is a better solution.