http://www.jaxa.jp/topics/2007/11_e.html

Only 100 miles above the moon and still no moon buggies or flags waving in the 'wind'. nice clips marksteven.

It'd be a bloody good camera to get pictures of a flag and a buggy from a hundred miles up...

Can't wait to see all the close ups people find of 'alien artifacts', buildings, etc and the claims that NASA has edited all the photos and there's some big conspiracy behind it all...

That'll be fun!

I can see my house in the first pic =D

The flag was waving because the pole was being rotated.

How exactly is a camera going to see a 10 foot long buggy from 100 miles away?

I looked through the website that was linked by the OP. It was nice to have a look around.

From some japanese blurb, I think the HDTV has two settings. Wide angle (145 meter per pixel) and telephoto (35 meter per pixel). In English, it says they use it for publicity releases. IOW, no detail on the surface.

In looking at the science information, their science instrument camera has a 10 meter resolution. Further, I looked up some information that MID informed us about on the conspiracy board, regarding Apollo. I perused some old press releases, and saw a faint pencil mark that looked like a "30" figure describing the span between the lunar descent module's lander pads.

That would mean 30 feet. Even at 10 meter resolution, the Japanese science camera is not quite powerful enough. It will just be three pixels to resolve a lander vehicle- 10 feet per pixel. It needs to be able to see some detail, too.

I forgot to mention. The news release said the satellite probe is at 66 miles altitude (100 km). That probably is to satisfy the science requirements.

belial you know very well that this is not the thread for the Moon Hoax stuff. Please keep conspiracy theories in the right forum... this one is for science. Thank you.

Funny you should say that...
When the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is launched next year it will carry a camera, imaginatively named Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera which will have a resolution of 0.5 meters (1.6 ft) per pixel. This is sufficient resolution to identify no only Apollo hardware but the earlier unmanned Soviet and US landers as well.

Edited to add:
Incidentally the Exploration Of The Moon in the Space News forum is updated regularly with all the latest information from the Kaguya mission (indeed the pictures that the original post refers to were posted there a week ago). It is also updated with the latest information on the construction on the American LRO and on the Indian Chandrayaan orbiter, both due for next year.

Unfortuantely the Chinese National Space Agency has not updated the English language version of it's site in a while. When itt does the latest news on the Chinese Moon orbiter, Chang'e, which started making scientific studies this week, will be posted there too.

ever seen google earth, you can see car's parked in the driveway, some are detailed enough to make out animals and people. however this is for topographical imagery not how many grains of sand or rock on the surface.