Can the VLT spot the LM on the Moon?

Telescope to challenge moon doubters
By Robert Matthews in London
November 25 2002

Was this real or faked?

Conspiracy theorists, you have a problem. In an effort to silence
claims that the Apollo moon landings were faked, European scientists
are to use the world's newest and largest telescope to see whether the
spacecraft are still on the lunar surface.

For years, doubters have claimed that NASA, the United States space
agency, spent billions of dollars faking the landings to convince the
world that it had beaten the Soviet Union to the moon. Evidence cited
has ranged from the absence of stars on any photographs taken by the
astronauts to the way that the Stars and Stripes they planted seemed
to flutter in a vacuum.

This month NASA tried to put an end to the controversy by
commissioning a definitive account of the evidence for the landings.
Days later it dropped the idea after criticism that it was wasting
money by taking on the lunatic fringe: naturally, this only boosted
claims that the agency was trying to hide something.

Now astronomers hope to kill off the conspiracy theory forever by
using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) - by far the most powerful
telescope in the world - to spot the Apollo lunar landers.

Operated by European astronomers in the Chilean Andes, the VLT has
four mirrors eight metres across linked by optical fibres. It can see
a single human hair from 16 kilometres away.

Trained on the moon, such astonishing resolution should enable it to
see the base of one or more of the six lunar modules that NASA insists
landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972.

Supporters of the conspiracy theory welcomed the news that astronomers
were to photograph the landing sites. But Marcus Allen, the British
publisher of Nexus magazine and a long-time advocate of the theory,
said photographs of the lander would not prove that the US put men on
the moon. "Getting to the moon really isn't much of a problem - the
Russians did that in 1959," he said. "The big problem is getting
people there."

According to Mr Allen, NASA was forced to send robots to the moon and
faked the manned missions because radiation levels in space were
lethal to humans.

The Telegraph, London

I think it would be great if the old world were to be the first to finally spot traces of the LM's and Rovers on the Moon to disprove crazy theories that actually originated from the very country that took humans to the Moon.

Raoul