Top Document: [sci.astro] General (Astronomy Frequently Asked Questions) (2/9) Previous Document: B.19 What was the Star of Bethlehem? Next Document: Copyright See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge It is possible to locate and observe the Apollo landing "sites," but it is *not* possible with current equipment to see the hardware left there, since their sizes are far too small to be resolved successfully. For example, a common backyard 6 inch aperture telescope can only resolve craters on the moon which are about 1.5 miles or so across. Even telescopes with a resolution comparable to that of the Hubble Space Telescope can only resolve details about 100 meters across (the size of a football or soccer field). Lasers fired from Earth are bounced off special retro-reflectors left at these sites by the astronauts, and the faint return pulse is then detected by Earth-based telescopes equipped with special instruments to measure the Earth-moon distance, but otherwise, we can't see any man-made equipment left at the landing sites. If you wish to see the sites through a telescope for yourself, here are the approximate locations of the Apollo landing sites (see the Project Apollo Web site, <URL:http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo.html>, for more exact locations and descriptions or <URL:http://www.boulder.swri.edu/%7Edurda/Apollo/landing_sites.html> for set of images of the landing sites at increasingly higher resolution): APOLLO 11: 0.67 deg. N, 23.49 deg. E, near southwest edge of Mare Tranquillatis a little northwest of the 6-mile wide crater Moltke. APOLLO 12: 3.20 deg. S, 23.38 deg. W, in Oceanus Procellarum southeast of the crater Lansberg (also the landing site of Surveyor 3). APOLLO 14: 3.67 deg. S, 17.47 deg. W., in Fra Mauro highlands just north of northwestern rim of large shallow Fra Mauro crater. APOLLO 15: 26.10 deg.N., 3.65 deg. E., Next to Hadley Rille and southwest of Mt. Hadley in the lunar Apennine Mountains. APOLLO 16: 8.99 deg. S., 15.52 deg. E., higlands north of the ruined crater Descartes and southeast of the double crater Dolland B/C. APOLLO 17: 20.16 deg. N., 30.77 deg. E., in the southwestern Taurus Mountains roughly between the craters Littrow and Vitruvius. User Contributions:Top Document: [sci.astro] General (Astronomy Frequently Asked Questions) (2/9) Previous Document: B.19 What was the Star of Bethlehem? Next Document: Copyright Part0 - Part1 - Part2 - Part3 - Part4 - Part5 - Part6 - Part7 - Part8 - Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: jlazio@patriot.net
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:11 PM
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