joe 90 wrote:Don't forget, the hubble telescope was another big failure and had to be reworked before it was any good.
Just think what it cost?
They still can't get pics of the moon either, nor the Apollo landing sites.
Its not supposed to.
That's like saying top fuel dragsters are a failure because they don't reach 400mph. They were never intended to, so the fact that they can't doesn't make them a failure. Same thing goes for the Hubble. It was never built to be able to take pics of the moon. If it did take pictures, the size of the object in view would be 0.002 arcsec. A dot, basically. A tiny, blurry Dot.
Might as well say the shuttle was a bust because it couldn't reach Pluto. The Mars Rover was a bust because it couldn't reach saturn. It's the same thing.
An object on the Moon 4 meters (4.37 yards) across, viewed from HST, would be about 0.002 arcsec in size. The highest resolution instrument currently on HST is the Advanced Camera for Surveys at 0.03 arcsec. So anything we left on the Moon cannot be resolved in any HST image. It would just appear as a dot.
For comparison, the size of an arcminute, 60x the size of an arcsec
An illustration of the size of an arcminute. A standard association football ball (22 cm diameter) subtends an angle of 1 arcminute at a distance of approximately 775 meters
So the size of a standard soccer ball when viewed from 775 meters away. Then divide that by 60 because an arcsec is 1/60 of an arcminute.
I doubt anyone could even see a soccer ball at 775m away. Much less when viewed from the distance when viewing something the size of an arcsec.