In an effort to silence conspiracy theorist claims that the Apollo moon landings were faked, European scientists are to use the world's newest and largest telescope to see whether the missions' debris is still on the lunar surface.
For years, doubters have claimed that NASA spent billions of dollars faking the landings to convince the world that it had beaten the Soviet Union to the moon. Supposed evidence was put forward, ranging from the absence of stars on any photographs taken by the astronauts to the fact that the flag they planted seemed to flutter in a vacuum.
NASA tried to put an end to the controversy by commissioning a definitive account of the evidence for the landings. Days later, it dropped the idea after criticism that it was wasting money by taking on the lunatic fringe. Naturally, this boosted claims that the space agency was hiding something.
The row recently boiled over into fisticuffs when police in Beverly Hills were called in to investigate claims that Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin - the second man on the moon - had punched a conspiracy theorist.
Now astronomers hope to kill the conspiracy theory by using the Very Large Telescope - the most powerful telescope in the world - to spot the Apollo lunar landers.
Operated by European astronomers in the Chilean Andes, the VLT can see a human hair from 16 kilometres.
Trained on the moon, such resolution should enable it to see the sites of one or more of the six lunar landings which NASA insists were made between 1969 and 1972.
Dr Robert Massey, an astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, doubted conspiracy theorists would be convinced by photographic evidence.