Our Apollo astronauts left laser reflectors on the Moon that are still in use today.
The people who claim Apollo was a hoax don't know even that basic fact about our first Moon landing mission.
Don't be one of those people.
Posted on 10/24/2005 1:08:48 AM PDT by Nitro
Our Apollo astronauts left laser reflectors on the Moon that are still in use today.
The people who claim Apollo was a hoax don't know even that basic fact about our first Moon landing mission.
Don't be one of those people.
Bump!
We landed on the moon. This is not a what do you think issue, this is an absolute fact.
I am not accusing, just wondering.
Why is it that re-building the Saturn-5 is impossible today?
I think life itself is a hoax and we're really living in a Matrix, we just don't realize it.
and you know this..... how?
I saw a documentary last year that claimed the moon landing was actually done on a hollywood set and was put together by Stanley Kubrick. They interviewed a lot of famous and powerful people from the late 60's and it appeared as if all of them were fessing up. It didn't take long to realize they were all talking about Watergate and good editing was making it appear as if they were talking about the Moon Landing. I never figured out if this was someone's attempt at fraud or if it was a satire on conspiracy documentaries, but it was funny as can be.
Are you smoking that weed from the butcher shop on 3rd and 86th? ;-)
Exactly. And there is footage around of these lasers in use. If you look hard enough you will find it.
We have landed on the moon and found that it is made of cheese. The astronauts what never made it to the moon were just lactose intolerant.
We could be living in some sweaty part of an immense giant and not even know it.
Still, why is it that NASA cannot re-buid the Saturn 5?
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Will anyone notice, 100 feet away, something else Armstrong left behind?
Ringed by footprints, sitting in the moondust, lies a 2-foot wide panel studded with 100 mirrors pointing at Earth: the "lunar laser ranging retroreflector array."
Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong put it there on July 21, 1969, about an hour before the end of their final moonwalk. Thirty-five years later, it's the only Apollo science experiment still running.
University of Maryland physics professor Carroll Alley was the project's principal investigator during the Apollo years, and he follows its progress today.
"Using these mirrors," explains Alley, "we can 'ping' the moon with laser pulses and measure the Earth-moon distance very precisely. This is a wonderful way to learn about the moon's orbit and to test theories of gravity."
Here's how it works: A laser pulse shoots out of a telescope on Earth, crosses the Earth-moon divide, and hits the array. Because the mirrors are "corner-cube reflectors," they send the pulse straight back where it came from.
"It's like hitting a ball into the corner of a squash court," explains Alley. Back on Earth, telescopes intercept the returning pulse-"usually just a single photon," he marvels.
The round-trip travel time pinpoints the moon's distance with staggering precision: better than a few centimeters out of 385,000 km, typically.
Targeting the mirrors and catching their faint reflections is a challenge, but astronomers have been doing it for 35 years.
A key observing site is the McDonald Observatory in Texas where a 0.7 meter telescope regularly pings reflectors in the Sea of Tranquility (Apollo 11), at Fra Mauro (Apollo 14) and Hadley Rille (Apollo 15), and, sometimes, in the Sea of Serenity.
There's a set of mirrors there onboard the parked Soviet Lunokhud 2 moon rover-maybe the coolest-looking robot ever built.
In this way, for decades, researchers have carefully traced the moon's orbit, and they've learned some remarkable things, among them:
(1) The moon is spiraling away from Earth at a rate of 3.8 cm per year. Why? Earth's ocean tides are responsible.
(2) The moon probably has a liquid core.
(3) The universal force of gravity is very stable. Newton's gravitational constant G has changed less than 1 part in 100-billion since the laser experiments began.
Physicists have also used the laser results to check Einstein's theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity. So far, so good: Einstein's equations predict the shape of the moon's orbit as well as laser ranging can measure it.
But Einstein, constantly tested, isn't out of the woods yet. Some physicists (Alley is one of them) believe his general theory of relativity is flawed. If there is a flaw, lunar laser ranging might yet find it.
NASA and the National Science Foundation are funding a new facility in New Mexico, the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation or, appropriately, "APOLLO" for short.
Using a 3.5-meter telescope with good atmospheric "seeing," researchers there will examine the moon's orbit with millimeter precision, 10 times better than before.
"Who knows what they'll discover?" wonders Alley.
More and better data could reveal strange fluctuations in gravity, amendments to Einstein, the "sloshing" of the moon's core. Time will tell ... and there's plenty of time. Lunar mirrors require no power source.
They haven't been covered with moondust or pelted by meteoroids, as early Apollo planners feared. Lunar ranging should continue for decades, perhaps for centuries.
Picture this: Tourists in the Sea of Tranquility, looking up at Earth. Half of the planet is dark, including New Mexico where a pinprick of light appears. A laser.
"Hey, mom," stepping over a footprint, "what's that star?"
There were at least 100 highly educated engineers involved in the actual landing, not to mention about 15 highly trained, honorable Astronauts involved in all our moon landing. Only a cretin could believe all these people would be willing to compromise their own integrity for such an stupid fraud. Oh, lets not forget to mention all the people who would have to have been involved in the production of the fraud, the scientist who examined the moon rocks, and Apollo 13 which would have made absolutely no sense. For all these people to maintain total silence for these many years is simply beyond the realm of possibility. Even the fact I am writing this makes me feel like a damned fool. It's like trying to explain why there can't be a tooth fairly.
Money
prisoner6
No, just good old Butt-wiper!
Tom Murphy, a postdoc at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, skis "like a kamikaze." But mostly, he says, his recreational life is fairly sedate.
Murphy gets his rush from science. "LLR provides enough adrenaline to keep me happy." LLR is lunar laser ranging, which means bouncing lasers off small mirrors on the moon, then detecting the returning photons. "It [LLR] is like winning the lottery and then being told there's an equally remote chance the money will make it to your bank account."
Murphy, who earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is an astrophysicist with a knack for building scientific instruments. At Caltech he built a new kind of spectrograph for the 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory and used it to study colliding galaxies, which, he learned, get hotter sooner than most people realized. "Among other things," he writes, "I learned that merging galaxies can fire up to ultraluminous status early in the encounter, against the prevailing wisdom that put such activity only late in the final merger stage."
Not satisfied with the challenge of measuring light already impinging on Earth, for his postdoc Murphy has sought out a greater challenge: He intends to shine light at the moon, bounce it off retroreflectors left by astronauts during the Apollo missions (the first retroreflector was deployed by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the Sea of Tranquility during Apollo 11)--then catch the photons that make it back to Earth.
The technical challenges are considerable. "First you must point the laser at the retroreflector array," Murphy wrote in a recent e-mail. "It's hard to make sure you're pointed at something you can't even see to one arcsecond precision."
Next, notes Murphy, you have to make sure your detector is looking at exactly the same spot, with the same degree of precision. "Otherwise, though you may be getting light back, you won't see it." The timing must also be precise: "The high background rate from the overwhelmingly bright moon means you have to gate the detector for periods as short as about 100 nanoseconds." 100 nanoseconds in round-trip delay time corresponds to 15 meters of one-way range. "Earth's rotation is about 400 meters/second, so the distance between your observatory and the reflector is constantly changing."
The hardest part of the experiment may be the lack of feedback; it's hit or miss, and if Murphy misses there's no way to know what went wrong. "Unless all of the conditions are satisfied, there is no return, and no indication of which element might be off. You don't know if you've got it right until you've got it right."
Big game
It's a difficult challenge, but then Murphy and his colleagues are pursuing powerful prey: They seek to expose violations of the principle of equivalence, the core concept of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Einstein's theory says that gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of space-time, and that space-time's curvature is determined by the distribution of mass as well as that of energy. The General Theory has been tested extensively, and no violation has ever been observed. For example, the gravitational attraction of an atomic nucleus has been observed to depend not only on the nuclear mass but also on its binding energy--on the energy stored in the field holding the nucleons together.
But there is reason to suspect that gravitational energy is a special case, that measurements of sufficient accuracy might expose a violation of the equivalence principle when energy is stored in a gravity field. Some theories, including string theory, suggest that such a violation should occur.
A substantial portion of Earth's mass and energy (about half a part per billion) resides in its gravitational field. According to Einstein, the rate at which Earth falls toward the sun should be determined not only by its mass, but also by its gravitational energy. Put another way, Earth's gravity has gravity, and that gravity ought to affect Earth's trajectory around the sun.
The moon, in contrast, stores much less of its energy in its gravitational field, so its gravitational field will make a much smaller contribution to its motion toward the sun. Precise measurements of the relative positions of the Earth and moon make it possible to determine whether they are accelerated differently. Murphy is doing essentially the same experiment Galileo did when he mythically dropped objects off the tower of Pisa, except that Galileo's objects are now the Earth and moon, and not only the objects' mass, but also their gravity, are expected to contribute to their acceleration.
Despite its technical difficulty, lunar laser ranging is capable of exquisite precision, and Murphy thinks it's possible that his measurements--the most accurate measurements ever of the moon's path around Earth, if all goes well--may be precise enough to reveal a violation of the equivalence principle. "I should say that I believe this is only a remote chance," Murphy notes, "but you never know until you look."
Murphy is not the first to use lunar laser ranging to test the equivalence principle. Ken Nordtvedt, a member of the Seattle team, first proposed the equivalence-principle violation, known as the Nordtvedt Effect, that Murphy seeks to measure. Nordtvedt's ideas were largely responsible for NASA's decision to put retroreflectors--collections of "corner cubes," which, because of their geometry, reflect light precisely back toward its source--on the moon.
Although what Murphy is doing isn't new, he intends to do it better than it has been done before. "What we offer," says Murphy, "is a new set of glasses that will let us see potential violations an order of magnitude smaller than currently accessible." Murphy's measurements should trace the moon's orbit with millimeter precision.
http://nextwave.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2002/03/05/9
I have. Most observatories have the equipment.
Why is it that re-building the Saturn-5 is impossible today?
Money.
Or, to be more precise, it's not impossible, just pointless.
Technology as advanced considerably since the 1960's. NASA has become a political tool instead of a military organization and is thrashing about for a mission, and bleeding funds while doing it.
If we had sufficient reason to need a booster with the capability of the Saturn V, Northrop/Grumman or Boeing would have no trouble building one once properly funded to do so.
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