aecarol1 t1_jba5q5u wrote
There is no telescope on Earth today that could resolve the lander. Even telescopes planned over the next few decades, with perfect skies, probably can't do much better than a couple of pixels. The can't effectively can't do anything other than say "something" is there. But they can't produce a "photo" of the lander you would recognize.
But the astronauts will lay down retroreflector panels, just like the Apollo astronauts did. Any decent size university has the equipment to flash a laser at that part of the moon and see a few photons reflected. This is done all the time to establish the distance between the Earth and the Moon, as well as to study the wobble of the moon.
Before they go, the place that they will land will not reflect laser pulses, but after they lay out the panel, it will.
tl;dr it will not be possible to photograph the landers from Earth, but it's easy to shoot large lasers at the moon and observe the photons come back only from places where astronauts or other man-made objects have landed. This is because they carefully place retroreflector panels.
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