The Hubble is really not very much closer to the moon than land based telescopes. The Hubble would still need a 100 meter mirror.
Their response would just be “all that proves is that we can get someTHING to the moon, not someONE”. It’s pointless.
Right. But I mean if someone constructs a telescope that powerful, they’re going to put it in orbit (or on the side of the moon that faces away from us).
Of course, putting it on the other side of the moon still wouldn’t allow users to see the Apollo landings. 
What if we used many smaller mirrors, with gaps in between them like the VLA radio telescope, to image the lunar landers? We could make the telescope’s diameter almost arbitrarily large (say 2 kilometers, which is peanuts in the Utah Salt Flats). Would the resulting image be too dim to see?
You need to be able to maintain alignment between the telescopes, along with the coupling mechanism to a fraction of the wavelength of the energy you are imaging. For a radio-telescope this ranges from not too hard to pretty difficult to just manageable. Very long baseline stuff across the planet is possible at long wavelengths. The VLA has hard points where the telescopes drop down, and buried waveguides that the telescopes connect to that reticulate the signals back over. (At least this was the initial design, modern changes may well do a lot more processing in each scope. But the principle remains, the VLA is very precisely engineered in the large, in order to maintain the needed accuracy. When you need to maintain the baseline to say 50nm, you have serious problems. It is just on the edge of viable with telescopes built pretty much next to one another. There are notional designs for space based telescopes, that can use the very stable environment to make it work, but we are a long way from seeing any built.
It is a good question. There are two parts to the answer. One is the light grasp, and the other is the question of whether you could actually get the light into the observer’s eye, due to the size of the exit pupil of the system. Given that the moon is illuminated by the sun, we have a lot of light, but the focal length, and thus f-ratio of the optics may be rather big. Very late (2am) here, so no more numbers for the moment. Not hard to calculate however.
The OP asks for a telescope that provides a clear, pure, visible light image, one that it is not possible to say contains any fraud. So any sort of image intensifier, or digital processing is out. You need mirror, eyepiece, eye.
If there were a telescope that could do it (and there was a proposal to build a 100-meter telescope), it would be able to do a lot of other stuff, too. Astronomers would be lining up to use it for other purposes (well, they’d be writing proposals for time on it, not actually lining up, but same thing). I doubt the time allocation committee, which decides who gets to use the telescope when and for what, would consider looking at the moon landing sites a valuable use of telescope time. Time on a big telescope is a valuable commodity, and there’s never enough to go around for all the proposals that would actually advance scientific knowledge. This thing would cost at least a billion dollars to build (probably much more), and whoever put up that billion dollars is going to want it used for something worthwhile.
Mr. Neville points out that, if you did have a 100-meter telescope, you wouldn’t want to point it at the moon. The moon is bright, and this thing would gather a lot of light from it and concentrate it onto a small area. I looked at the moon once through a much smaller telescope, and it was painful. The moon through a 100-meter telescope would probably be bright enough to damage any instruments. You’d need something like a solar filter that goes over the aperture of the telescope to avoid damaging the scope, and there are some obvious practical problems with doing this for a 100-meter telescope.
Even if you did have a 100-meter telescope that could safely look at the moon, I doubt it would do much to quell moon landing doubters. It’s not as if anyone who doubts we went to the moon can knock on the observatory door and ask for a look. As mentioned above, time on this telescope would be in great demand. Also, large telescopes don’t have eyepieces. Astronomers don’t look through them, they use electronic instruments to collect data. The moon landing deniers are going to say that data is faked.
The Mythbusters went to Apache Point Observatory and used the laser facilities there to confirm that there are laser reflectors on the moon. They showed this on TV in 2008. Have the moon landing deniers gone away as a result? No. Why would images of the moon landing sites taken through a 100-meter telescope be any different?
And even then, it doesn’t take much imagination to come up with a denialist counter-argument.
“You hid an image of your so-called moon landing somewhere in the optics and you’re just magnifying that into this eyepiece.”
Followed by “I don’t have to prove you did it; you have to prove you didn’t.”
Followed by fuming, ranting, and conspiracy-theory rage.
It’s not a technological problem. It doesn’t have a technological solution.
It is extremely expensive to put things into space. We have earth based telescopes that have much bigger mirrors than the Hubble telescope. The Hubble mirror is 2.4 m. The biggest earth based telescope I have found with quick googling is the GTC on the Canary islands with a 10.4m mirror. The Keck telescopes in Hawaii are 10m. There are lots more that are larger then Hubble.
Excellent points but think about how little we know about the next 50 or 100 years. Looking back to 1910 and calculating the leaps in technology is mind boggling. I full well expect that 100 years from now we will have some previously thought impossible technology.
As others have noted, ground-based telescopes still have a very significant role. And, though expensive, they are of course dramatically cheaper than space-based ones.
Use Buzz Aldrin’s answer: Just ask the Russians.
If we were fakers they would have known (because they could track us) and they would have been trumpeting the news of our cheating to everyone.
O brother, another hoax photo from NASA. :rolleyes:
But you can have much bigger telescopes on the ground than in space. Space telescopes are constrained by things like the size of the vehicle that takes them up to orbit, and by the expense of lifting mass into orbit. Those aren’t issues for ground-based telescopes.
It’s also much, much easier to repair a ground-based telescope that needs it, or to put new instruments on it if you want to do something that wasn’t in the original plans. You don’t need a space shuttle to do any of this with a ground-based telescope. Ground-based telescopes also have a longer operating lifetime than space telescopes. There is a telescope at Lick Observatory near San Jose that saw first light in 1959 and is still being used.
Or the Chinese.
Imagine that you work for the Soviet space program in the 1970s, or for the Chinese space program today. If there is a reasonable doubt that the US sent people to the moon in the 1960s, you’re going to be all over it. If you find out the moon landings were faked, there’s a chance for your country to get a lot of international prestige and discredit a rival by pointing this out, and actually sending people to the moon. Even if you don’t care about that, if it turns out that the US moon landings were faked, it’s still good for you if your country decides to try to send people to the moon. That means more funding for the space program. That’s good news for people who are employed by the space program. I imagine the Soviets did and the Chinese do employ some pretty smart people in their space programs. These people know it would be good news for them if the US moon landings had been faked, are smart enough to figure out how to prove it, and have access to the technology they would need to do that.
Or imagine that you are a reporter at pretty much any newspaper or TV station. If the moon landings were faked, this would be a huge, huge story for your paper or station, at least comparable to Watergate. Any newspaper or TV station would love to run a story like this. Any reporter would love to have something like this on their resume. This is true no matter where you are in the world, so if the US government is buying off the news media, they’d have to buy off all the news media in the world.
I thought it was:
Use Buzz Aldrin’s answer: whack
Yes it is (and does). We send all the hoaxers to the Moon to see for themselves. And we leave them there.
There is a couple mirrors left on the moon. Mythbusters visited a observatory and they aimed a laser at the mirror. It bounced back and they got a time measurement.
Proof, but not very exciting.
They need to send a rover to the moon. Land close to the original site and then let the rover photograph the site.
Was wondering if you meant 1859, Anne, but the Great Lick 36 inch refractor dates only from 1889. Doubt the Hubble will be lasting that long. Lick’s a neat visit, though I never attended during their public open houses/viewing parties. Funnily, the thing I was most in awe of was the giant IR panorama of the Sierras that used to hang in the Visitors center, that was taken at Mt. Hamilton.
It would be nice if some of the older spy satellites could have been re-purposed to be space-based astronomical observatories. The mirror size to get the ridiculous resolutions that are leaked from the NRO as possible require mirrors on par with that of the Hubble, IIRC. Probably cheaper though to just build a new Hubble.
The answer to your first constraint is to build it on the Moon, or at least lift the materials from there. There are more than a few engineering hurdles to overcome though… Still, can you imagine the size of mirrors we could build in zero-gee? And then there’s the solar power sats you could build, and so on, and so on.
Last year NASA was given two spy satellites that never went into orbit. I don’t know what they have decided what to do with them.