Why is it Impossible* For Telescopes On Earth To See Spacecraft on The Moon?
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- Amateur astronomers regularly track and photograph spacecraft in deep space using telescopes. Tiny spacecraft can be seen millions of miles from Earth using carefully planned observations. However to view spacecraft on the surface of the moon, this isn't possible because it's easy to pick out a bright spot against the dark background of space but doing the same against the bright background of the moon isn't useful. To get images of spacecraft on the moon (or mars!) you need to get much closer so that the details can resolve.
Here's a list of special site on the moon which have been observed by LRO:
www.lroc.asu.ed...
* and by 'impossible' I mean that it's merely ridiculously difficult unless you build a massive device and someone correct for the atmospheric turbulence.
Well, space archeology is officially a thing now...
Sparcheology.
Thants.
Exoarchaeology.
So you can be a Jedi and Indiana Jones at the same time
@@starty8814 So... Spock without the force?
“Space is dark. You just won't believe how deeply, blackly, mind-bogglingly dark it is. I mean, you may think it's dark in the depths of your soul, but that's just sparklers to space.”
Nice reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
underrated
Great comment. I give it a score of 42.
@@rmvdhaak 0
@@equation1321 Do you know the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything?
1969: Phone line on the moon.
2019: Sorry sir, your data rates are that high because you live in a rural village.
08:24 I repeat, there is no Top Secret Alien Spacecraft Monitoring project in Hawaii.
hmmmmmm
you say that cause it's Top Secret, obviously you wouldn't know about it
Of course not. Its located in Bonn, Germany. They needed to put the old government buildings to some use when they moved to Berlin
There is no Very Large Space Monitoring Radar in Puerto Rico.
@@Kineth1 sad but alas now true
I swear, every time Scott does the Intro his voice gets slightly Deeper. In a few years we’ll need infrasound microphones in order to detect his voice.
He's getting Manlier and Manlier with each video
Eventually, videos will just start with a seismograph reading.
I always find myself mimicking 'Hullo it's Scott Manley here', everytime before his video starts. I can't help myself and it's a tad worrying.
@@bluemountain4181 every video, he’s getting scott _manlier_
I’ll leave
That's another consequence of the expansion of the Universe.
"Panstarrs is looking for space craft... Oops I mean asteroids". A slip of the tongue gives away Scott's knowledge of the true nature of Panstarrs, a secret earth defense project.
The Council of funding Nations will be disappointed
Dang! I knew it!
I just wanted to comment how the number of likes is 42... - but two people liked it before I could even start typing.
I think the Defense Department's telescope that looks at others satellites is actually sitting next door to Panstarrs :-)
Nice plot for a holyood movie.
Unfortunately you lost the flat earthers and lunatics at 'think' 😂
No, I'm still here. I don't get it 🙁
😉😂🤣
I hope these replies are sarcastic
@@HDTomo I hope so haha
Scott is wearing that shirt for a reason.
That's fine.
Interesting as always, Scott. My kids have heard so many of your intros now that they sometimes run round the house shouting "Hello, it's Scott Manley here", in what they imagine is a Scottish accent!
This is awesome 😂😂
funny guy, inches, miles.....
mad non science people!
@@lucasrem1870 Its hilarious cus the only country that got to the moon, used those units.
Same country that invented half this internet infrastructure too.
It is like trying to photograph a speck of dust on the surface of an illuminated incandescent light bulb's glass shell.
Well, the fact that we found that rocket stage should give us some reassurance that we are seeing a whole lot of the objects that might potentially impact Kerbin
We need the Blunderbirds to come and clean up Low Kerbin Orbit using their SSTO 'garbage trucks'!
@@InventorZahran SpaceX are working on it... 😉
(8:42) There's something poetic about how our trash is floating so far out into space from a previous mission, but Sol says "here, have it back".
"hey, you dropped something, is this yours?"
I love how you dropped words like arc-seconds and angular resolution, but seemed to intentionally not use the word "albedo"
But if I get my binoculars out on a clear night, I swear I can see a 6 foot tall metallic monolith on the moon!
18ft!
Take this like and never speak of those things again.
It's just a weather baloon.
I can see a teacher that works in my school (Harry Herpson High School) on the moon. Its blurry but its definitely him
@@websitesthatneedanem
It’s a small one, that’s all they could fit in the Tesla.
Scott: "They wanted to make sure that the place that they thought it was, was the place that it actually was."
"The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where isn't from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from where it is, to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position that it is, is now the that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't. In the event that the position that it is in, is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation. The variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was. The missile guidance computer senario works as follows; because the variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not just sure of where it is, but however it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice versa, and by differentiation this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and it's variation, which is called error."
Ouch! My head aches.
Thing is, if you listen to it enough, it starts to make sense. 🤷🏻♀️
@@LexieAssassin
That's what I am afraid of. ... ...
8:24 Scott let slip that we're secretly tracking the Vulcans passing by Earth.
Illuminati slips up, revealing alien secret.
They're on a survey mission, they have no interest in Earth. Too primitive.
42 Years and 5± monthes to go.
@@tomf3150 Ah yes, April 5th, 2063. What happens 10 years before that is the bad part.
@@BnORailFan This isn't?
You mentioned how the light varies on orphaned booster stage (I think that is what I heard.)
I was very surprised to learn that 1. Satellites tumble during their life in orbit, or at least many of them do, and 2. The military can actually determine (much of the time) what kind of satellite they are looking at based on the "fingerprint" of reflected light as they tumble.
I learned this when I worked on the GEODSS tracking system, way back in the mid '80s. The system is still used today, and comprises 4 geographically separated locations on the surface of earth. Each site sports qty 2 40 inch diameter f2 folded reflector telescopes, plus one 15 inch wide field scope for quick scans, and performs multiple entire sky surveys (including the stars) each night. We had one entire setup in the back yard, and it was great being able to go into the telescope domes and control room after hours to see what the test operators were doing.
They were looking for satellites that were not supposed to be there, but I read that it is now also time shared to look for near earth crossing objects. Roughly stated, the system is able to see objects as small as a basketball, as far out as geosynchronous orbit. It amazes me that we (USA) could do this more than 30 years ago.
I guess that I waxed a bit off topic, but my point is that yeah, a great deal can be learned from an object's light reflection pattern.
The best part of every video is "Hello it's Scott Manley here."
It was actually "flight safe"
I think you mean "Hullo".
@@aspuzling Yup. It's definitely "Hullo".
I must confess, it makes me smile too. A great beginning to the episode, that has become quite familiar.
Yes. Along with «I’m Scott Manley. Fly safe»
I always think the best part is the middle bit where he talks about interesting things.
1.170.000 follower's... Never ever heard him ask to give his video a "thumbs up" or ask to subscribe 😀. Even "brilliant" or "surfshark VPN" never get mentioned in his videos 😉
Come to think on it, I don't think Scott has ever been sponsored by anyone either ...
He does it for the fun of it and I'm certainly grateful !
Scott has a day job, so he can do this. Other youtubers sort of have to get sponsors or else they go bankrupt
Scott has been required viewing material for the star citizen crowd for years.
It's weird how technology works. Cameras need light to work. Why are there stupid people that don't understand this simple fact? Go learn how cameras work and you'll understand this video a little bit better. I liked this video. This was a good video. Keep up the good work.
Scot talks about the sample return capsule landing in Australia, and just a week or so ago I watched the DVD of the 1971 film, *THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN.* 😊
tThis will be the beta strain...
They thought covid was something to worry about!
@john smith >>> I have never watched the TV movie, but from what I have heard most people say about it I agree.
that is an all-time classic
Another book on Scott's bookshelf is a James Corey sf novel, which I'm reading, based on that recommendation - also explores the alien-seed theme, and does it well.
@@Allan_aka_RocKITEman I can just remember watching (mostly from hiding behind the sofa) 'Quatermass and the Pit,' serialised in blurry black-and-white. It must have been about 1959-1960. I wonder how well that would work these days.
Curious Droid also did a good video on this too.
Also ... too:
SYNTAX ERROR. REDO FROM START.
Scott Manley offers common language breakdowns of Scientific information, drops a Spinal Tap Quote.........This is why I love this channel!!!!
Yeah but I do miss his Kerbal videos ^^
"It's amazing that we can see these old objects in space" - Actually, this is a quite young space object, compared to all the other objects we see out there.
I often have to mention to people that we would need a 100m diameter UV (200nm) telescope, ideally in LEO to see details on the Moon at a resolution of 1m/px and that the largest telescope that's in operation right now is 10.4m.
It rarely does anything. I even had people question the basic optics formulas I used for these calculations saying that they would trust them if I would've derived them myself. Some people are just too far gone.
I also had an unpleasant discussion with someone that refuted all evidence about Moon landings and space flight in general because "nobody ever landed a [manned] rocket on Earth" - and of course no amount of argumentation, proof or physics calculations were able to convince him that it's actually easier to land a small lander on the Moon than it is to land a whole rocket vertically on Earth.
Prediction: the moon is too bright which makes it exponentially more difficult to see a small object compared to if it were in the dark of space.
EDIT: not correct but in the right direction!
I thought it was just because the moon won't hold still. Infuriating! 😉
It's like why, say, search and rescue can see your beacon light from kilometers away (provided it's powerful enough) - its lamp is less than an inch in size, but from that distance and at that ambient light (at night) it looks as if a huge ball of light (many meters wide) existed at your location. Rescuers' eyes collect the extra photons and they overload the adjacent rods in the retina (or pixels in a camera), so the light is now visible, even though it's miniscule in angular size! Like, if it was real-size in your eye, it would be a tiny fraction of one of eye's "pixels". Just like distant streetlights or floodlights at night.
"Blacker than the blackest black times infinity." -- Nathan Explosion
"Darker'n a black steer's tuckus on a moonless prairie night." - the cowboy from The Big Lebowski
Only one sport has ever been played on the moon.
A game of golf on the moon was recorded in 1971. Alan Shepard hit a golf ball on the surface of the moon.
Wanted to share some useless info :)
His buddy threw the Javelin.
@@scottmanley could you hit a ball into lunar orbit?
@@paulhaynes8045 not from here.
Maybe with a 9 iron?
You can only do it once because you gotta ditch the space suit.
No.
In fact I don’t believe there are any firearms that have the muzzle velocity to reach lunar orbit.
The optical interferometer CHARA has units spaced 330 meters apart, which gives it a resolution of half a meter (if you were to ignore the atmosphere).
I tried to ignore the atmosphere, but I passed out.
Its a shame we can't use that space debris to build space stuff it costs a lot to get it up there.. space recycling would be a cool emerging market. Also the image of the return capsule in the desert reminded me of this old movie the Andromeda strain. Lol
"the damn fool opened it!"
Looks in telescope: Ahh, there's my keys..
4:55 Techniques Spatiales has a fantastic YT channel (in French, and an other one in English : "French space guy")
Yes he does!
Salut les amis francais! :D
Ah thanks, I only knew of the French channel and watched all the videos with subtitles. His latest video is not on the English channel though, so maybe he has already given up on it...
Alex space French guy cooking?
@@max_kl he is currently working on two big projects : Techniques Aéronautiques and a documentary about the Soviet lunar rocket N1. His English channel is probably not his highest priority now (but I think he wants to make his N1 movie available in English)
This is why I always design my KSP rockets so that every booster either falls back to Kerbin or smashes into my destination.
You may ask "But isn't that expensive?" and my answer is "Shut up I'm playing sandbox only anyway."
this is the first time I've seen pictures of the Hyabusa capsule retrieval. Reminds me of the Andromeda Strain! As always a fascinating video.
"Sir; There's a fire".
Why can't Hubble spot the moon landing sites? Because it's difficult to focus into a Hollywood basement.
Edit: Jokes. Don't any of you go taking me literally now. Except space deniers, you lot can have at it.
why does the Japanese dude holding the capsule look like he's defusing a bomb?
Not a bomb, but need to be handled with as much, if not more, care than a bomb.
My guess would be protection from potential radiation exposure... maybe? Also: holding it like a box of newborn kittens because you don't want to be the guy that drops that after everything it's been through and for.
Actors doing their best to add gravitas to the scene
@Alain Martel has it partly right in that you do have to treat it with as much care as a bomb.
@Suricata Kat was wrong. It's not because it's radioactive.
Here's what I've heard is the reason for the suit:
The reason the dude is wearing a "bomb disposal suit" (properly called an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) suit) is that the capsule uses pyrotechnics to do many things, like detaching the backshell of the capsule, and deploying the parachute(s).
If any of those pyrotechnics didn't go off for some reason, that means that that whole sample return capsule must be treated as if it was a live pyrotechnic device, and an EOD suit is a suitable (pun intended) way to handle such things. Right when you walk up to the thing you don't know if all the pyrotechnic devices went off or not, so the first person to go close to the thing has to be in a EOD suit.
TL:DR The guy's in an EOD suit because the sample return capsule has handling requirements that almost exactly line up with the handling requirements of unexploded/dud ordinance (UXO).
@@michaeltaylors2456 you never heard of the protocols dealing with devices that have or HAD explosive substances in them ? You also think that hundreds of millions of dollars mission does this thing just for kicks,yes ? Do you have some better research that would make such protocols obsolete ?
Idiot. Have some respect.
I always have to laugh when flat earthers come up with these analogies about not being able to see a car in Houston from Dallas (apart from the earth's curve making this impossible), but yet you can see a satellite of the same size from the same distance.. They just don't understand that you're not seeing the satellite, you're seeing the light that is reflecting of it on a black background. And the brighter the light is, the bigger it looks. Even the Sputnik, which was just a 58 cm ball, could clearly be seen from earth because it so reflective. I bet a lot of people also think that some stars they see are bigger than others, when in fact they all are so far away that they are effectively point sources, they just have different brightness which make them appear to have different sizes.
You have nested single quotes on a shirt. Should've used \'
Good catch.
Or backticks in JS
@@voyageruk2002 Unless the shirt does not support ES6 Template Literals ;)
Two of them are single quotes (one an open quote and one a closing quote), the other two are apostrophes. They are just represented by the same symbol in that font (bad).
Scott, thank you for pronouncing Chabot as “Shabo” instead “Chabut”!!!
Well, he lives close by
@@pauldzim yeah, I grew up nearby but I'd STILL hear people say "Chabut".
need a video that's just Scott saying "mirror"
8:23
Uh-huh, sure, asteroids. Riiiiiiiight...
Dang I'm am extremely early. I love your work Scott, keep up the great work ❤
Flyers eat bootyhole
That's why you cant see a polar bear in a snow storm.
@@quandaledingle8960 They are a better hockey team than you, so ligma.
I love these kinds of videos. Any chance you can do a video about weird anomalies / pictures / videos from official resources, like the Black Knight satellite and other live feed situations?
I appreciate that he still says "for those who speak imperial" every damn time lmaoo
US Americans don't speak Imperial. They speak US Customary (as well as French Metric which Congress accepted as a standard in the 1850s). 16 oz in a pint. 128oz gallons. US ounces too are different (bigger) than Imperial. The US Congress adopted a standard decades before the Imperial Council met in the old kingdom's Commonwealth to finally build their standard for their colonial oppressions...i mean posessions. If you're going to be a little turd, then get your shite right.
@@STho205 then it is even worse than I imagined...Thanks for the info tho
@@martipg3866 vice le France. They still use medieval post Roman measures though, and so do you, ...probably without even realizing it.
@@STho205 Vive *la* France. And appart from niche use of nautical miles we really only use metric, unless you have a specific example in mind. Even our pint is metric, being half of a litre.
@@Релёкс84 you use fonts. 72 points of a French inch. Time is also not metric, nor is common radian geometry. Napoleon tried metric time and the people rejected it. Jefferson proposed a metric complex new measure based on the foot cut into 10 inches, etc when he was Sec of State 1788-1792. Congress rejected that as a pedantic exercise of no use, but they did coin metric money, over a century before European and Asian nations. Congress just standardized on the most common classical measures, based on 2,4,8,16 since they were designed by the ancients as market measures. Imperial later chose a independently different standard on volume that was half metric 20oz pints and 160oz gals as well as mils of inches.
French Metric was designed as a naturalist/scientist measure. The new Republic had to pick something since every province had different market measure systems. It was as good as any, but in 1795 most people did not think or work in tens or decimal math, as that was novel. Customary is best for splitting up bulk items evenly since it is based on 2,4,8,16...
F and C are both developed by naturalists and on a 100 scale. C being 0 to 100 for freezing/boiling water. F being 0 to 100 for the scale of animal health and survivablity. 50 being the moderate temp (Spring/Fall) for Europe at time.
I, in the US, use both systems based on which is better for the task. In the 70s we learned both and the US is officially bi-measure as Canada is bilingual. Use as you like. If not in the US then the advice might be, When in Rome as a hallmark of courtesy.
France always seemed a girl to me, thus *le* as a purposeful jab. Long live Wellington.
Sooooo how big a mirror do we need on earth to "see" humans' leftovers on the moon with a reasonable resolution?
8:25 Sure. . . we believe you *X-Files plays*
The thing I love about this channel is the math. Math isn’t complex when explained this well. It’s the easiest and most precise way to describe anything. (I’m European and I had to make myself say Math rather than Maths)
Curious Droid did a great video on this as well. Nicely done to the both of you.
The smallest features I can see on the moon are the group of little craters on the floor of Plato, each about 2 km across. This is limited more by the atmosphere than by optics. I'd need at least 10,000 times better resolution to tell the difference between a rock and Apollo hardware.
Laura Halliday
What is it u use, SLR, lenses?
That's why we need telescopes in orbit! Send Hubble to mars!
3:15 When you said "against a dark background" I immediately started looking for the book of the same name by Ian M Banks on your bookshelf and sadly I could not find it.
maybe if you put it up against a dark background you'd be able to spot it easier
Through A Bookshelf, Lightly...
It's a Rocket thing. You wouldn't understand.
You should say on the upcoming flight of the sn9 "I'm Scott Manley here, flip safe" right?
I have a feeling sn10 will beat sn9 to the launchpad, sn9 tried to flip in the dressingroom! ;)
@@Bratfalken It's just overenthusiastic.
SN9 got cold feet!
Might be scared of heights?
I’m slightly gutted by this. I did my astronomy badge when I was a kid, which gave me my life long love of space stuff. But back then, the leader that did the badge took us to an observatory nearby, and we were told the little thing we were looking at on the moon is the Apollo lander.... clearly BS I’ve just discovered ;-(. Every day is a school day! Great content Scott, thank you!
I dunno, Bob the flat earther from down the pub says those shadows are just dust from firmament-moths that fly into the bulb.
You need a better caliber of drinking buddies.
@@scottmanley Scott! You're right. He's heading to the ice-wall in a motorised bathtub soon anyway.
Hello Scott. Thanks for this video and all your others. I’ve been tuning in for years. When I was a kid I learned how space is dark, which you mentioned in this video. My question is; the sun lights up our planet earth, so why doesn’t the suns light show up in space? What causes the suns light to only show up when it hits our atmosphere? Hopefully there is an answer for this question.
Moon
Don Nebes@ the suns light does show up in space..except you are not there to see it...we can only see sunlight directly in our eye or if it is reflected off an object such as the moon...
Ok thanks for the reply’s.
8:24 slip of the tongue, or the start of the overton window shift? /s
more like a realignment. feels like it's been shifting - backwards - for quite some time.
THANK YOU! I was getting tired of these kids using A CERTAIN WORD WRONG... YOU, like me, are old school. ONE, and its spacecraft! Two or more, its still spacecraft.... NOT spacecrafts.... not hovercrafts.... NO NO NO! So thank you Scott!
I can’t hear the words “against a dark background” without thinking of the Iain [M.] Banks book of the same name. Not Culture, but an underrated one IMO.
Excellent novel that got three mentions in this video. ;)
If you look on his Twitter he says that book was just out of frame
But not one of the ones behind him on the shelf - I sort of wondered if he'd plonk it there as an easter egg
@@jackdaniel4446 He did but I was out of shot, he said so on twitter
And as Banks warns us, it really IS a dark one. Spooky dark.
Oh crap...queue the 'flat earthers' and 'the people who keep denying that man landed on the moon and safely returned'...........
On a side note...whenever I get depressed I just remember...'I speak Imperial'...it cheers me up, no end....😊
I thought Earth's atmosphere also played a factor in seeing distant/small objects.
There's a wibbly wobbly thing involved there.
A Brit good point. there seems to be a lot of wobbly things going on
Yes it just makes your images fuzzy and the ‘pixels’ bigger
@@scottmanley there's also a bit of diffraction through the atmosphere, so positions are altered too outside of light travel tome
I did the back-of-envelope math once to figure out how big of a mirror you'd need to image an Apollo decent stage from earth and it was comedically massive - a couple hundred meters if you wanted a few "pixels" of lander. I wanted to try to set up an optical long baseline thing like at Mt. Wilson but it would have been WAAAY to expensive to buy at least three "nice" telescopes and a bunch of mirrors and quite painful to align them and get them pointed at a target as small as an Apollo landing site. like how would you slew?
My God, it's full of stars.
One.. by four.. by nine...
Every place you look is full of stars. Its only because we are living inside of a galaxy.
@@MoaiMann i highly suggest that you watch 2001 A Space Odyssey. The reference i made will become clear, but you have to watch the entire film.
@@andersjjensen I had to Google that one. I tip my hat to you, sir.
@@RustyorBroken i see. Time to watch a movie
Hey Bob, I'm looking at what Jack was talking about and it's definitely not a particle that's nearby. It is a bright object and it's obviously rotating because it's flashing, it's way out in the distance, certainly rotating in a very rhythmic fashion because the flashes come around almost on time. As we look back at the Earth it's up at about 11 o'clock, about maybe ten or twelve Earth-diameters. I don't know whether that does you any good, but there's something out there.
„[…] amazing that we can see these old objects in space!“-I think most objects we can see in space are _a lot_ older than those! They are incredibly young in comparison… 😄
The actual radial diameter of the moon is ~11500 arcseconds.
I assumed that the outcome of arctan was parts/full circle, with full circle=1. Of course, one full circle=2π, and of course, as a software engineer with ten times my experience and intelligence, Scott was right all along.
Calculate safe!
Do they know how far and where the Centaur stage went before returning to Earth over the 40 years? 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️
With the information they have now (the mission records of the launch and then the recent observations) they should be able to calculate its entire orbit from launch to present. IT's just a matter of doing the math now that there are reference points to check your answers.
Even without the calculations, you can take a pretty good guess as to where it went. It was designed to boost a spacecraft to the Moon from Earth. The distance between these is several orders of magnitude less than the distance from Earth to any other notable space object (Lagrange points could be interesting to visit, but aren't objects). So unless it was 100x overdesigned I suppose it would just have coasted around on an eccentric orbit in near-Earth space.
@@yetanotherstronk Do you think there is interesting space junk stuck in the La grange points ?
@@jakedee4117 I'm not qualified to say! But I think if the Earth-Moon and Earth-Sun points do have stuff in them it's much more likely to be dust and asteroid debris than our own space junk. Or curious but not very subtle aliens? We have our own probes in at least one of the Earth-Sun Lagrange points.
When I read the thumbnail I came here expecting to find posts from nay sayers claiming "Its because we've nev..." Nope Im not even going to say it.. I am very happy to say I was pleasantly surprised. Scott Manley, home of universal enlightenment 👍
8:24 "... looking for spacecraft ..." lmao, Scott confirms we're looking for alien spacecraft
Um. A probe sent by Earth is a spacecraft.
full on Freudian slip
This is a very clever description. Another effect that is taking place is diffraction. Caused by the edge of the optics (your pupil, or the optical tube of a telescope) a star would only be about the diameter of an electron. Visualize the angular diameter of 100,000km diameter viewed from 5 light years away. Diffraction leads to the Airy rings that bloat the image of a star so that it covers multiple pixels. Each point on the moon does the same and all of the Airy rings overlap, so the sub-pixel image of the lander is washed out in all of the other detail. This is what leads to the definition of the diffraction limit of a telescope and is many times the size of an Apollo lander even for the size of the Hubble telescope. We are all amazed at the Hubble images of a thousand galaxies and imagine we are seeing lots of detail, but on that image, Hubble’s diffraction limit is around 10,000 light years. That is, we can’t see the detail of anything smaller than 10,000 light years in diameter.
TL;DR: Because the Moon is covered in rocks approximately the same size and brightness as small spacecraft.
8:40 That's not entirely correct. I thought so too at first, but it turns out that the capture was not due to a gravity assist by the Moon. You can confirm this by doing a computer simulation with the Moon completely removed from the system. 2020 SO would still have been captured in essentially the same way. What actually caused the capture were its interactions with the L1 and L2 Lagrange points.
This exact argument happened in my high school class, where my teacher was an advocate for teaching about flat earth. I was the only educated one there, and one of the girls in the class asked why they don't just build a telescope with the resolution to see the descent module for the lunar landers.
@Trebor yeah it was actually an AQR class but most of the time he spent lecturing about conspiracy theories
Put more simply: to telescopically detect an object in deep space, you merely need to collect enough photons from it (reflected or emitted) to create sufficient contrast against the blackness of space. Image resolution is irrelevant. To image an object on the surface of another world, you need sufficient resolution to differentiate the object from its background, and all Earth-based (or orbiting) telescopes currently lack sufficient resolution to do that.
Last time I was this early I had to spend a few weeks in the NICU.
Last time I was this early SN9 hadn’t tipped over. :(
every radio engineer knows this as path loss and noise floor, size doesn't matter, it's the number of photons you get as a function of brightness (system gain), and path loss (distance) and noise floor (background 'brightness').
A good example for what you are describing are satellites which are visibile with the naked eye (at night): They are some 5 meters accross but you can see them with the naked eye from a few hundred kilometers away. But if you were standing on a mountain and could see a few hundred km far, there would be no chance you could spot a 5m large object on another mountain this far away.
Need to watch John Lenard Walson to see some really close ups of the moon, for an amateur astronomer. It’s unbelievable. Some of the craft he is capturing in space are mind blowing.
Very helpful explanation of the limitations and abilities for a subject that frustrates many casual space fans. We can rely on Scott to bring it into concepts we can grasp and then take it back up to astonish and exceed our grasp yet again.
The amazing thing is that we can still see where the U.S. Flags were planted on the surface using sufficiently powerful telescopes, the down side is that from the decades of completely unshilelded solar radiation exposure, the dyes used to color the fabric red and blue have all but certainly faded leaving the flags bleached white... So the way the flags currently look would make it will appear as if France was there and had already surrendered.
The reappearing Centaur stage reminds me of how we used to treat the oceans like an infinite toxic waste sink some 70 years ago, and how we are now baffled by the ignorance of our grandparents.
That is what our grandchildren, living in the true space age, will think of us.
The black field white spot, white field black spot problem vs resolution is also relevant to SLA 3D printing when polymerizing small positive or negative features. Great explanation
TLDR; when looking at the moon, the SNR is too high to identify something small.
Too low.
You can see a point source of light regardless of how small it is. Resolution is your ability to distinguish between two point sources next to each other. It’s amazing how many flat earthers don’t realize that
2020-SO, the Nasa version of that piece of food you should you threw out, but then found it much later behind the fridge
too small too far away....BUT... you can see the ISS for several seconds at a time and I even found a stationary satellite once, it was spinning and gave off a little flashes of reflected sun light.
so TL;DW, just because you can see a pollen seed on a piece of black paper doesn't mean you can find a flour grain on a whiteboard.
'You probably thought this was a real tesla roadster - NOPE, Chuck Testa Roadster.'
Another amazing episode! How an earth (not on moon 😉) do you find all that footage? Great stuff, thanks!
Shoot for the moon.
If you miss, decades later people will wonder what the heck that thing on a close approach orbit is.
I thought this may be of some interest.When you take a photo of a star in the night sky then increase the photos brightness, you see more stars. I tried the opposite with a daylight photo of the moon, I darkend the photo to reveal a very bright light on the edge of the moon.
So what You're saying Scott is we need to fund and deploy a Hubble clone In Orbit around the moon so we can see every little detail :-D
Not needed really. You know, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter 😉
@@zeendaniels5809 I think Plasmaburndeath was referring to wanting better resolution than the LRO hence wanting a Hubble like telescope in lunar orbit.
... That just means we need a bigger floodlight. Hey Big Clive...
Wait why didn’t we photograph 2020 SO with a good telescope when it passed by Earth?
The 2.3m Lunokhod 1 was lost between September 14, 1971 and March 17, 2010 until it was imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Hullo Scott I love your videos and how much work you put into them. I always learn new things when I click on your videos. Keep doing what you’re doing! Also you deserve more subs!
Funny, this video proved moon landing conspiracy theorists wrong.
Hyperspectral imaging telescopes can "see" man-made objects on the moon.
The laser mirrors left by Apollo are detectable by earth telescopes that are also used to blast them with a laser pulse
I am new to having a telescope, but I was thrilled that my family was able to see the rings of Saturn with the telescope I purchased at a garage sale! I was wondering why we could see Saturn and its rings, but we couldn't see anything with my telescope of spacecraft on the moon! Now it all makes sense. I will let my family know. Thank you!
There is many an astronomer that had their passion ignited from a childhood view of Saturn through a telescope. There is no nothing like seeing it for real, is there?!?! I'm glad to hear you and your family had such a positive experience. It's also a good sign that you and your telescope are a good match if you can make it do what you want it to do. This isn't always the case with a first scope. Enjoy!
5:46 Tom Scott, if you're listening we have a job for you.
Another great video. Question: Could you see man-made objects on the moon with an "analog" telescope that just magnified visible light which you imaged directly with your eye?