Lasing the Moon

I am curious to know how many of you are aware of the Apollo 11 Laser Ranging retroreflector experiment? There are about four or five more of these such reflectors about the moon as well that i am currently too lazy to look up. These reflectors are lased with a .7 meter telescope. How many of you would be tempted to try and lase these yourselves?

don't they shot megawatts of laser up to get a few single photons back?

Divergence would matter too. At it's closest distance the moon is 363,104km away. A laser with 1mRad of divergence would be over 363.1km in diameter when it hits.

-Tony

Kendon's got the general idea. It's not something in our range of capabilities.

kendon said:

don't they shot megawatts of laser up to get a few single photons back?

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Yeah.... IIRC... it was on a Mythbusters episode that the few photos of laser beam
return was mentioned...

Jerry

got me there, that was exactly what i was refering to

but i saw it on another tv show few days ago. i think it is a little lame that all these tv shows come up with these retroreflectors as the ultimate proof of having been on the moons surface. i mean we would be able to bring it there by an unmanned vehicle, wouldn't we?

Didn't work... broke the moon in half...

EDIT: rog : done... reduced by 50%

^^  
Could you resize your picture please, my screen won't the moon @ full size

Regards rog8811

If I remember correctly the laser is a pulsed system averaging 60W or so. Here's a gee whizzer for you. They also do ranging at Apache Point in New Mexico using a 3.5m telescope with adaptive optics creating a much better resolution and a much stronger return. "Strong is a relative term here—APOLLO records approximately one returned laser photon per pulse, as opposed to the roughly 0.01 photon-per-pulse average experienced by previous LLR facilities."

Oh and as a sidenote relating to the moon landing myths, (I love this particular myth because it swells with crackpots), the most concrete evidence the U.S. landed on the moon was from the Soviet Union. Of course they monitored the radio traffic, and used radar to track the vehicles. If the U.S. hoaxed it the USSR would have been all over it. The conspiracy theorists cannot seem to explain how the U.S. managed to keep the USSR, the enemy of the free world and evil empire vying for the souls of lost countries, quiet about it.

I don't think that will work with any thing we can build here. Maybe you could hit a sattelite though? There are sights dedicated to tracing decommisioned and "nonexistent" sattelites. Maye with a powerful enough laser and telescope you could hit one. Heck, you might even to be able to hit something with optics on it. I would definitly stick with the decommisioned ones though. At least if you don't like scary men in black suits and helicopters. ;D

In 1997 we damaged a satellite with a chemical laser. Lets see here, thats a multi-megawatt system. even if we had a 50W laser, it would be dang hard to hit a satellite.

Balisong said:

In 1997 we damaged a satellite with a chemical laser. Lets see here, thats a multi-megawatt system. nay nay nay say nay nay nay.

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Yeah yeah I get it. ;D Super hard near impossible. Maybe for you but that's only because you've already given up. After acknowledging that it already had been done.

Its not that I havn't given up---> its that I never need to pursue something like that.

Yes, I had to learn about it for a maths class- Basic Trigonometry. We were supposed to find out how the distance was once measured from the earth to the moon ( The greeks did it, nearly got it right! No kidding!)

We then had to find out how they do it nowadays. Apparently its accurate to a couple of centimeters, which is pretty amazing.
Next time someone asks me the point of using lasers, I will reply to stop using maths
And burning stuff. Or just being freakin' cool.

Helioplasma said:

Didn't work... broke the moon in half...

EDIT: rog : done... reduced by 50%

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Hahaha xD