Re: Landers on moon invisible?

["CWatters" <colin.watters@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Coming soon...
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/11jul_lroc.htm

why haven't we photographed them? There are six landing sites scattered
across the Moon. They always face Earth, always in plain view. Surely the
Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things
astronauts left behind. Right?
Wrong. Not even Hubble can do it. The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that
distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 meters
wide. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 meters
across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.

Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will
carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon's surface. Its
primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will
photograph them, many times, providing the first recognizable images of
Apollo relics since 1972.