Pointing"Hubble" at the moon?

Will somebody please tell me wether or not this has been done,or why it cant be done?

Have we ever pointed Hubble at the moon to verify the Landing site of the first (or any) moon missions? surely this would clear up all sorts of doubts and sceptic theorys? Is it too powerfull to point at the moon ie.would the images be just blurred like when your to close up to some thing with binoculars? I really have no idea wether or not ive just made a stupid post or theres actual reasons for this happening/not happening?

It may well have been a thread on ATS but I can't remember for sure, but I've seen this question posed before. Believe it or not one of the reasons this cannot be done is that the resolution of the image if you pointed the Hubble at the moon would not be clear enough to pick out something that is only a few metres across. One 'pixel' on an image of the moon taken by Hubble would be larger than the size of the bit of the landing craft, debris etc that was left behind.

Like I said, believe it or not.

Thanks mate.
so we must have a telescope that isnt that powerful that could bring the moon in to good focus but i cant imagine goverments let the public search "willy,nilly" for things we wanted to see?
The landing site was the "sea of Tranquillity" which must have been on the side of the moon we can see because of the light sources in the Armstrong/Aldrin photos (even though i think there defo fake) so why has no one printed photos saying "heh,look theres the landers and the buggys,n stuff" or "nope weve scanned the whole damd place and theres nothing there?"
im confused (but that happens all the time anyway!)

There is not telescope on earth (on off earth, indluding hubble) that is powerful enough to image equipment left on the moon. There have been many threads on ATS about this, just do a quick search.

The theoretical resolving power of a telescope, measured in arc seconds, is calculated by dividing the aperture of the telescope (in inches) into 4.56. The largest telescope on Earth is the 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii. The theoretical resolving power of this telescope is 0.012", however the Earth's atmosphere limits the resolving power of any ground-based telescope to about 0.5"-1.0". The Hubble Space Telescope does not suffer from this limitation; thus, with an aperture of 94 inches, HST's resolving power is 0.05". At the Earth-Moon distance of 239,000 miles, the smallest object that can be resolved by HST is about 300 feet. The largest dimension of any hardware left behind on the Moon is 31 feet, which is the diagonal distance across the LM's footpads. No telescope, presently in existence, can see the Apollo hardware from Earth.

www.braeunig.us... - Very good essay. I recommend this to everyone.

I remember another thread a while back, 6 months or so. The question was the same. I think someone pointed out the Hubble did take pictures of the moon. I think those pics were posted as well. It has been a while though. Try using the search.

Hubble shoots the moon.

Here are a few images of the moon, taken in 1999 by HST.

Hubble moon

Looks like max resolution is about 280 feet..as sensfan mentioned

Hubble might not be able to do it, but I am damn sure there are plenty of Lunar probes in orbit that could do it.

I think there was an ESA one there last year looking for water...

those pics suck, why arn't they in color?

Also, Yeah ESA's probe in not there yet, if the one your refering to is smart-1, there taking the slow way using gravity assist's because its cheaper. But look for new moon pics in late 04' to early 05'.

If Im not mistaken, the hubble was used to scope out goot landingspots on mars for the rovers there. I think I read that in another thread on a similar subject.

Do you think the guys who operate Hubble, NASA, really want to doubt their own claims of landing in the moon?

I don't get it, why in godsake would they do it? They know they did it, because they did it.

Hypothetically speaking, say they point it at the Moon, and found that the most famous men in their organizations were cheaters, how would they feel and how would the world feel about U.S?

So we can safely assume that Hubble won't be pointed at the moon to check its validity.

Kidfinger, there have been a series of NASA (and now an ESA) orbiters around Mars far better suited to finding landing sites than Hubble is.

Originally posted by Kano
Kidfinger, there have been a series of NASA (and now an ESA) orbiters around Mars far better suited to finding landing sites than Hubble is.

Exactly, the 2005 Mars missioin is called Mars reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and that can see things of 1 meter length, the hubble can only dream of that.

Heres a Mars pic that was taken by Hubble.
2003 Mars Hubble Pic

Hey, I found something for all those Hubble supporters out there.

I personally think we should let it burn up in the atmosphere around 2007 , istead of send a billion dollar robotic mission up there just to keep in on line 5 years more.

a ground base telescope in antartica nearly 1/3 the cost of the hubble's launch price, and it out performes it.

Hopefully the hubble killer

Hubbles deep space resolution is unmatched actualy. Its just its resolution and focussing on nearby objects thats off.

The real problem is that Huble is a deep space telescope, made for and capable of high resolution imaging of deep space.

This resulting in the sorry fact that Huble is extremely farsighted.
Meaning it can see further then anything else in our telescope arsenal, but it can't focus its magnified view on nearby objects.

There has been an Huble moon imaging run with some nice pictures in result, but as stated earlyer, the resolution is rather bad and far to low to be able to make up moon landing artifacts.

Its just not made for near earth object imaging.

There are more then enough other satelites out there to do just that though and if I'm not mistaken, there was a satelite sent to the moon to do a full high res surface scan of the place. I don't know how high the resolution actualy was, but if you see the resolutions capable by the Mars sats, I'd think the ones looking at the moon, should be able to make 1meter/pixel resolution scans at least.

Originally posted by stumason
Hubble might not be able to do it, but I am damn sure there are plenty of Lunar probes in orbit that could do it.

I think there was an ESA one there last year looking for water...

Actually there's much more probes orbiting Mars than moon.
Moon has been mapped well enough for current purposes long time ago.
And you don't search water with optical cameras, you use radar's and other that kind systems for it.


I think most accurate photos of moon have come from Clementine.

Originally posted by Murcielago
those pics suck, why arn't they in color?

Do you want to see more different shades of gray?

Originally posted by Kano
Kidfinger, there have been a series of NASA (and now an ESA) orbiters around Mars far better suited to finding landing sites than Hubble is.

That's right.
I think it's MGS whose pics they have used.

Originally posted by Murcielago
a ground base telescope in antartica nearly 1/3 the cost of the hubble's launch price, and it out performes it.
Hopefully the hubble killer

I think you live that kind of area of US so that you should know better how hard it would still be to operate and service these even in as "mild" climate as what antarctica has.

And it could only see under 50% of the sky so they would still have to build other one to northern hemisphere, like into Greenland.

Thanks guys for your info.

Originally posted by thematrix
Its just its resolution and focussing on nearby objects thats off.

This resulting in the sorry fact that Huble is extremely farsighted.
Meaning it can see further then anything else in our telescope arsenal, but it can't focus its magnified view on nearby objects.

No, I don't think it's because of focusing problems. (care to provide references... because I haven't seen those ever)

It's just that moon is so far, nearly 400 000 kilometers when probes take they're photos from distance of hundreds or few thousand kilometers at farthest.
For example: try seeing separate ants from distance of one kilometer, you would need damn big telescope (and magnification) to see those.
Now go to distance of two meters and compare what you see to former.

Let's assume that human can see one meter detail from one kilometer.
So if you wanted to see one meter detail from moon it would have to be "moved to distance of about 1/400 000th of its real distance" meaning it would require magnification of 400 000.
So now to what kind of telescope you would need?
Well, magnification is telescope's focal length's ratio to eyepiece's focal length and let's say we use eyepiece with 10 mm focal length (which is pretty normal).
That would mean focal length of 4 000 000 mm or 4 kilometers... that would be quit a long tube, or what you think?

And focal lengths of even biggest telescopes are in class of couple decameters.


Reason behind need for refocusing is difference between angles in which light hits the mirror. But after certain distance that angle doesn't really change.

Good example is my 11 cm reflector, after focusing it's same do I look moon which is little under 400 000 kms away or some galaxy 40 millions light year away, speed of light is 300 000 km/s and light year distance traveled by light in one year... do the math.

E.T. - I know its not the best climate and temp but for this telescopes ability with its (relitively) low price tag I think its worth it. and by Hubble Killer i meant that this is just one more reason to not spend so much on a dying dog.

There are a couple of problems with HST viewing things on the moon:

1. Size: An object on the moon 4 meters across, viewed from HST, would be about 0.002 arcsec in size. The highest resolution instrument currently on HST is the FOC, at 0.014 arcsec. That would work out to being able to resolve something about 300 ft across on the moon. So anything we left on the moon cannot be resolved in any HST image. It would just appear as a dot -- except see next point.

2. Motion of the moon: The HST pointing system is designed to hold it quite motionless relative to the distant stars -- but the Moon isn't. In 1 second of time, the moon moves over 0.5 arcsec. The shortest exposure time any of the HST instruments offers is 0.1 sec -- so an object we left on the Moon would appear more blurry.

To the left is the best picture Hubble has taken of the moon. It would be impossible to make out an object if it were only a few meters across.

Hubble could take pictures of the Earth, but the image quality would be extremely poor. The problems:

1. Hubble has a fixed focus which is set for looking at the distant stars and galaxies. The Earth is way too close. An object about 2-3 meters across would be one fuzzy dot. This is not nearly as good as Hubble could do if it could be focused.

2. The surface of the Earth is whizzing by as Hubble orbits, and the pointing system, designed to track the distant stars, cannot track an object on the Earth. The shortest exposure time on any of the Hubble instruments is 0.1 sec, and in this time Hubble moves about 700 meters. So a picture Hubble took of Earth would be all streaks in the orbital direction, and pretty fuzzy in the other direction.

From Nasa's Hubble FAQ.

The earth argument applies to the Moon too.
Hubble has a fixed focus for deep space observation. Earth and moon are just to close(not to mention they move to fast) for high detail imaging.