Could the Keck Telescope observe the artifacts on the moon left behind by the Apollo missions?
jrels2 asked:
It is stated that the telescope is capable of observing a single candle flame on the moon, so could the telescope take photographs of the Lunar Rover and American Flag? It would single-handedly debunk the moon conspiracies.
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It is stated that the telescope is capable of observing a single candle flame on the moon, so could the telescope take photographs of the Lunar Rover and American Flag? It would single-handedly debunk the moon conspiracies.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Google did it already…
June 27th, 2009 at 10:23 am
i don’t know how big of a candle you’re talking about here, but keck has the resovling power of a few hundred meters.
June 28th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
I hadn’t heard it stated that Keck could do that, but in that case it’s picking up light, not imaging the flame itself. The flag is not emitting light. It’s simply too small to resolve.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
No telescope is capable of seeing lunar artefacts from this distance. The resolution just isn’t available. Even if Hubble were to swing round a look at the moon if wouldn’t be able to resolve anything so small - even without the turbulence of the Earth’s atmosphere.
However the apollo astronauts did leave a set of special mirrors there that are designed to reflect light precisely back in the direction from which it came, and there is a facility at the McDonald Obervatory that continuously (horizon permitting!) bounces a green laser off these mirrors in order to study how the Moon’s orbit changes over time.
This wouldn’t be possible without those mirrors. The Moon is reflective, but not *that* reflective! You’d think this would shut the conspiracy theorists up but sadly they like to dig their heels in about these things
Google moon is a good source to be able to see what landed where, but most of this data came from NASA’s Lunar Surface Journal and lunar satellites.
As far as being able to see a candle flame, the Moon itself would drown it out even at high resolution.
Hope that helps…
July 2nd, 2009 at 12:59 pm
No.
The candle reference is about the ability to detect very small quantities of light. The telescope’s “light-gathering power”.
The ability to identify that it is a candle (as opposed to a small flashlight bulb for example) would require “resolution” (the ability to disginguish small shapes).
That is determined by Dawes’s limit. And for a telescope located inside Earth’s atmosphere, resolution is always ruined by air turbulence, even when they use adaptive optics.
Dawes’s limit:
A = 116/D
A is the resolution in seconds of arc
D is diameter of the main objective in mm.
For a single Keck, the diameter is 10 m (10,000 mm).
The theoretical resolution is about 0.04″.
In theory, this would allow us to see an object of
340,000,000 m (our closest distance to the Moon) times tan(0.04″) =
66 m (215 feet).
An object of that size would be seen as a single dot.
The Apollo lunar lander’s base is 30 feet across, if you include the extended landing struts.
The Keck telescopes can be linked into an interferometer. That would give them the resolution (in one direction only) of a telescope with a diameter of 85 m. (D = 85,000)
Since the resolution depends directly on the diameter, then it could be able to resolve an object of 26 feet.
In theory (since only one of the two telescopes has the laser needed for the adaptive optic to work properly, and since this resolution is only in one dimension).
In any case, it would NOT debunk anything. There is already enough evidence available. But the conspiracists would simply claim that the image was fabricated.
Since these people are even willing to believe that NASA controls astronomers in Iran, I don’t see how logic would affect them.
July 6th, 2009 at 12:14 am
1. No it can’t. It can make as much light visible in front of a black background, but you wouldn’t be able to see a candle, only a blurred spot, many hundred meters large. The candle analogies of telescopes is used for highlighting the light-gathering capability, but not the resolution of it. Even Hubble can’t see the artifacts on the moon, it reaches only 85 m accuracy on the lunar surface. But we can fire lasers at mirrors left behind on the moon, and measure the returned light and the round-trip time for each laser pulse (and thus know that the moon moves away from Earth at about 4 cm/year). The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter LRO will be the first spacecraft in lunar orbit able to photograph the descent stage and maybe even the rover. Other modern lunar probes had already been able to show where the Apollo lunar module kicked up dust on the moon and changed the color around the landing site.
2. Nothing, no evidence, not even if God would walk down on Earth and say so, would convince the conspiracy fans that the Lunar landing was real. Their argumentation is not because of any observation or evidence, and especially not because of a possible lack of evidence, but despite of it. Many of them believe in the nonsense, and if you have a strong faith, nothing, really nothing can shatter it.
This is also not because of the quality of the evidence - the existing evidence about the lunar landings is extremely good, no other historic event has such a good and complete set of evidence. Just see my sources. There are Gigabytes of technical manuals, drawings, mission reports and digitalized videos and photographies around. You can even create computer simulations from the public available data and check if it is physically sound, or if there anomalies in the time lines of the mission. You won’t find any. Even Apollo 13 can be reproduced from the data.
The only way, to fight the conspiracy, is truth. And the truth is out there and not hidden at all. Currently you are in the lucky situation to talk to people who did that, as long as they are still alive. But the only thing, the conspiracy people managed to do, is harass astronauts. That even some of the engineers and managers of the Apollo project are still alive, does not bother them…they harass astronauts only because of one reason: Publicity. They want to be in the media, to sell more of their crap. “Look at me, Aldrin punched in my face, buy my video explaining how this soft punch shows that these people can never have gone to the moon.”