Even Earth’s mightiest telescopes aren’t up to the task of imaging Apollo lunar landing sites. A lack of resolution is the biggest reason why
No telescope on Earth or in low-Earth orbit can capture an image like this one, a high-resolution view of a boot print on the surface of the moon.was butting heads seemingly every week with people who believed the Apollo moon landings were faked
Magnification is just how much you can zoom in on an object, making it look bigger. That’s important because while astronomical objects are physically big, they’re very far away, so they appear small in the sky. Magnifying them makes them easier to see. A Hubble Space Telescope image of the Apollo 17 landing region within the Taurus-Littrow valley of the moon. This image lacks the necessary resolution to reveal any sign of the lunar lander or the astronauts’ surface activity.meaning that major boosts in resolution usually require upgrading to a much bigger telescope. But no matter how big your telescope becomes, it will still have limited resolution.
But JWST is designed to be an infrared telescope. At those wavelengths, say around two microns, its resolution is comparable to what Hubble can see at visible light wavelengths. Out in the mid-infrared, at 10 to 20 microns, JWST’s resolution is even lower.
Meanwhile the moon is only about 380,000 km from us—and from Hubble. At that distance, Hubble’s resolution surprisingly limits it to resolving objects no smaller than about 90 meters across. So not only can wesee the astronauts’ boot prints in Hubble images but we also can’t even see the Apollo lunar landers, which were only about four meters across!
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