So where is all the equipment, flags, landers etc?

Question

Now im not a conspiricy theorist, i stayed awake all night and watched the moon landings on TV, yes ive read the books, and watched the documentaries but allways took them with a pinch of salt.

But recently i have been looking at the moon with Google earth and theres nothing no sign of any landings no Landers, Buggies, flags, tracks nothing except 3D graphics drawn in by Google the satelite pics are really good high definition but theres nothing visible, now bearing in mind i can identify my car outside my house through the attmosphere and the landers where far bigger than my car why cant i see them on the moons surface, where have they gone, have they been cleaned up by the Clangers or interplanitery scrap men WHERE ARE THEY????????

Answer 1

The Moon in the sky looks quite small and it seems like we should be able to see anything that we put on its surface, but that is only an illusion.



The amount of area of the Moon that you can see from Earth is 3.8 times more than the area of the entire United States (including Alaska).



You can't see the equipment with field glasses or any normal personal telescope.

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Answer 2

The high res images of your car, house etc you can view using Google Earth are taken using a variety of sources, including aerial photographs from planes. The satellite images are from Earth orbits, and tend to be lower resolution, just try to get a high res image of a location well out of a major town or city to see what a satellite image looks like. Google, as far as I'm aware, doesn't have access to Moon bound spacecraft to get the same high res images. Images from Moon orbiting satellites and Earth based telescopes would tend to likewise be too low a resolution to make out individual structures. Other spacecraft have gone to the Moon, but the priority has been to go to areas that have not already been visited. I suppose the relevant space agencies don't need to prove that there has been a Moon landing, so the need to fly over, just for a confirmatory photograph is pretty low on the priority list.

You can set up a laser to bounce off the reflectors that were left by the Apollo missions. They had to be placed precisely, so they could not have been left by an unmanned lander.

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Answer 3

The things left there by the astronauts are too small to be seen even with the most powerful telescopes. Even the Hubble Telescope cannot see anything on the Moon that would be smaller than a football stadium. The Moon is just too far, and those objects are just too small.



The only images of those objects come from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite that is in very low orbit around the Moon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter

Lunar module descent stages are clearly seen, as well as some other equipment. On one photo, even the astronauts' foot tracks are visible! http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html



By the way, the reason you can see your car on Google Earth is because those images come from aerial photography, not satellite photography.

Answer 4

THEY ARE STILLL THEEEEEEERRREE...HeHe.....but nobody did the washing up for years.

Those landers might be bigger than your car in volume but they are not much bigger in maximum dimension. than your car is ...around 4.5 metres long....actually if you've got an old Cadillac your car is longer than the landers.

Here is a calculation for a guy and you can confirm the results easily on the internet, incliding on a site linked in the answer.

To see the landers from Earth or in near Earth orbit like the Hubble Telescope you need a telscope of .......

O-n-e ....h-u-n-d-r-e-d....m-e-t-e-r-s...

100 meters across!!

Forty times bigger than the Hubble Telescope.

So Google Moonscape Watcher and Crater Peeper Inc ain't got no chance at all....Zilch..

You can see the stuff from lunar orbit but Google don't have images from that on their Moon map.

See the one starting...No telescope on Earth.....

https://answersrip.com/question/index?qid=20101028100704AAyov7s&show=7#profile-info-djVvNt8Naa . . . . . .

Zinko Dolliboob reckons it'll cost his lot more to put the landers in for scrap in the DinklebubV scapping sector than the entire fleet of zitlanders he's got.......more than the galactic MegaMacSqeeuffy chain spend on squeeff for squeeferburgo yuns in a year.

Too bad for old Zinkypops eh? Good news for us and the landers......

No other scrapping area would take that kind of stuff.....it's ancient.

So the landers stay there untouched.

Saved by the dim alternative prospect of economic ruin.

At least there's galactic agreement on one thing.....

See the landers with field glasses? hahahahaha

Where are the 200 meter wide field glasses they used then?

And the lenses each 100 times bigger than the world's biggest refractor telescope to get the 100 meters diameter they need ...the kind with lenses and not mirrors....

To see the flag from Earth you need a telescope aperture of a thousand meters......no kidding.

To see the pole holding the flag you need a telescope aperture of more than 12 miles.....

The Yerkes refractor has a 40" aperture...1 meter. It's the world's biggest refractor.

The biggest optical telescope on Earth has mirror a 10.4 meters across.

The biggest ever lens telescope.........but not movable ...was made for an exhibition in Paris and was scrapped afterward.It had objective lenses 59" across...around 80x too small to see detail on the Moon the size of the lunar landers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Paris_Exhibition_Telescope_of_1900 . . . .

Answer 5

>>bearing in mind i can identify my car outside my house through the attmosphere<<



Those high-res images on Google Earth are taken by an aircraft at low altitude well within the atmosphere, not satellites orbiting above it. The best imagery of the lunar landers comes from the LRO satellite, and it shows hardware and tracks from the astronauts. Google the LRO images. If it's not on Google Moon that is hardly evidence of anything suspect.

Answer 6

those pictures of the earth are taken from EARTH ORBIT.... the moon is hundreds of thousands of miles away.... looking at the moon is like looking at the sun, its an incredibly bright reflective surface... and on TOP of that you want to MAGNIFY the image?!?!



As soon as we get a satellite in orbit around the moon, you'll see al the pics you could ever want.... until then, you would need a hubble type telescope with a lens just over a mile across, to see and resolve the moon as clearly as it does the earth.

Answer 7

Google Moon does not use the most recent images of the Moon taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Here are its first pictures of the Apollo landing sites, and there are better ones coming.

Answer 8

Another one who's worked out what has eluded the greatest minds for the last 40 years.



Quick, write to The Times with your world-beating discovery.

Answer 9

Same thing that plagues anyone including you and any astronomer, capability of the optical kit to take the images. Mainly resolution. Look it up.

Answer 10

They HAVE been imaged from Earth. Just because you can't find them with Google doesn't mean that they aren't there.

Answer 11

Get yourself a decent telescope and look for yourself. The flag's still there. Don't believe everything you see on Google Earth. According to Streetview, my front garden is tidy.



In 1969, it was possible to see the shadow of the moon lander from the UK with a good pair of field glasses. Now of course, the conspiracy theorists might argue that no-one went to the moon - they just sent up a shadow,