Hey Clavius, love the argument you've had with Steve - overall its been hilarious...

But, JUST to play Devil's advocate, why does a mirror have to have a maximum diameter of 2.4m (and I KNOW that's the diameter of the shuttle cargo bay)...

You could have a sheet of material to act as the mirror (I *think* the russians tried this a few years ago to reflect light onto Siberia - see http://www.weathernotebook.org/transcripts/2000/02/07.html - 83m actually) so that's not the limitting factor - if you use an 83m mirror (using your calculations): gives an angular resolution of 8.0843373493975903614457831325301*e-9 Radians, or 4.6319841028046069046182604675017e-7 degrees.

Tan(4.63e-9 degrees)= 8.08e-9

To get the inches this could resolve you multiply by 19,008,000 = 0.15366708433734940093807624324442 or ~ 0.15 inches ...

Which is still not enough to read the paper but is almost of the correct order of magnitude!!!

And what about the adding effect of using several telescopes miles apart? (IIRC this gives a better resolution...?) I reckon we *could* get a picture from Earth orbit of the Apollo landers, OK Hubble couldn't do it, but it *should* be within our "scientific" envelope.... (not that even this would convince Steve)....

Basic trig gives us: tan(.4.63x10^-7)x19,008,000 = 0.15366708433734940093807624324442 m =

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