Forty years later, you can still see the lunar modules, and even footprints, left on the moon by the Apollo missions. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO took new pictures between July 11th and 15th.
"Not only do these images reveal the great accomplishments of Apollo, they also show us that lunar exploration continues," said LRO project scientist Richard Vondrak of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "They demonstrate how LRO will be used to identify the best destinations for the next journeys to the moon."
NASA officials say the next round of photographs, to be taken during the final mapping orbit, will have even greater resolution. Link -via Bad Astronomy Blog, where these pictures caused great excitement.
(image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University)
Hubble, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, Griffith, the VLT and all the other land/space-based telescopes simply don't have the resolution to shoot so tiny a target on the moon. Telescopes just don't work like that. Yes, Hubble et. all are super-powerful (so they can shoot images millions of light years away), but the distance to the resolution is the equally-important function of a Telescope. It'd be like using a backyard telescope to look at bacteria across the street. The fact that it took the LRO's super-high definition cameras in lunar orbit to take these pictures is pretty revealing.
Pointing Hubble at the Moon is like using binoculars to look at blood cells.
http://hubblesite.org/reference_desk/faq/answer.php?id=77&cat=topten