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.
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.
