 We can't see the Apollo lunar landing sites from the Earth, but we can see them from orbit around the Moon. I'm Amy Scherer, and this week on Vintage Space, we're talking about the Apollo lunar landing sites. It's the conspiracy theorists refrain and something that came up in my video about dust being proof of the lunar landings. If we really did land on the Moon, can't we just turn a really powerful telescope to the Moon's surface and look at the landing sites? Well, no. We don't have telescopes that powerful, and even NASA's Hubble Space Telescope can't resolve the lunar landing sites. Hubble can only resolve features as small as about 280 feet across on the Moon's surface, so there's no way it could see the descent stages left on the Moon. The landing gear spans less than 30 feet across. But NASA's lunar reconnaissance orbiter can see the landing sites, and we can compare the images captured by this spacecraft to maps NASA released in the 1960s and 1970s that show the astronauts traverses around the Moon, like Apollo 11. This first and most famous moon landing was NASA's most conservative mission. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent about 20 hours on the Moon, just two and a half hours of which they spent walking around. They set up a TV camera and flag north and slightly west of the Eagle's landing site. They set up some surface experiments south of the lander, and the furthest they traveled was to a crater to the east of their landing site. They just visited its western edge. This image from the lunar reconnaissance orbiter lines up with the map NASA released in the Apollo 11 post-mission report in 1969. We can see the lunar module's descent stage, the disturbed regolith north of the lander where they set up the camera and flag, which was knocked over when they launched from the Moon's surface, the footsteps leading south to where they set up their surface experiments, and the path they took to the crater east of the landing site. We can compare these traverse maps to orbital photography for all the Apollo missions, and it's pretty awesome that the maps NASA released following the astronauts around the Moon line up exactly with what we're seeing from orbit today. So how well do you think the LRO images support the fact that we did land on the Moon? Leave your questions and spacey comments below, and for weekly venture space updates, don't forget to subscribe.