I wonder if anybody has explored the dea - \"Did the people living on the dark side of the moon use the rover somewhere else for a few years and have only just put it back where they found it?\"

OK, first off there is no \"dark side of the moon\", the far side gets just as much sun as the side we see.
Second, on the article. since the moon has no atmosphere or winds to kick up dust, the retroreflectors wouldn\'t lose reflectivity due to dust build up - except maybe by micrometeroites. More likely the mounting of the mirrors (possibly glued on) could have failed due to the extreme temperature fluctuations, from an average of -184C (-300F) in the shade to an average of 101C (214F) in the sun. That\'s a lot of expansion and contraction, and even screwed in tight, things tend to work loose. So how did the Russians build their retroreflectors? Maybe they thought ahead and rather than build them out of 3 mirrors at right angles, instead they carved them out of a single block and polished them.

That\'s Russian technology for you... Immortal no matter what. I bet if you kick the rover a few times it would start working again.... xD

NASA found it 40 years later, then Gizmag \"discovers\" that almost four months after the rest of the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WowQsb1Ry5c

(I should know the answer to this)

Some people claim the USA\'s Moon Landing never happened - that it was staged.

So I\'d like to know - Is the American Lunar Module on the Moon\'s surface visible from Earth ? How about the Footprints ?

treggiari:
Yes, look at an article right here on Gizmag:

http://www.gizmag.com/apollo-11-landing-anniversary-pictures/12283/

treggiari:
correction (reread you post) Visible from the earth, likely not (not that I can find at least), but visible from moon orbit as in the Gizmag article. Seeing the landers from Earth would be like identifying a single grain of sand on a beach from an airliner.

@treggiari -
Really? *Really*?
Why is this still even a discussion?
I apologize, by the by, if you aren\'t one of the They-Faked-It! crowd. It might be a language-barrier thing, but it seems like you might be among the They-Faked-It! ignorati.
If so, here\'s a list of items left on the moon, some of which might be visible; some of which simply won\'t:
http://bit.ly/bw2Z1x
Why won\'t this subject die? I wish there were more Buzz Aldrin types in the world. Classic test-pilot, decking that know-it-all, smug, in-your-face They-Faked-It! guy (or, in that case, You-Faked-It!).
Why don\'t people get more excited about the *fact* that we went? Why the cynicism and attempts at taking away from one of the most amazing achievements of the human race? I don\'t get it.
Again, I sincerely apologize if we\'re on the same side here. If not, there\'s no apology - just the desire for more people to get excited about what you can accomplish when you get thousands of people working together toward an ambitious goal.
If all the conspiracy \"theorists\" put their time into celebrating what was done back then rather than making ridiculous arguments about sound stages and whatnot, I wonder what *they* could accomplish. Most of them aren\'t stupid - they tend to be meticulous and obsessive. If they had a little more skill in the critical-thinking department, their brains could be put to great use.
Sigh.

Thanks to Mark in MI !

I\'ve never been a Moon Landing denier, but it did occur to me if a lost Soviet Moon Rover can be seen from earth, the Lunar Modules, which were never even lost, should be.

If instead of providing co-ordinates, NASA have provided some lame excuse, I think we\'d all be deniers.

No problem. I won\'t share my wife\'s chocolate chip cookies, but (truthful) information is for sharing.