Guest farnsbarns Posted September 30, 2011 Share Posted September 30, 2011 What is it? Come and tell. The Apollo 11 mission left several sience experiments behind, one of which is still working. A 2meter square panel of cube corner mirrors used to detect the distance of the moon from the earth by firing pulses of laser light at it and measuring how long it takes to bounce back. Because the mirrors are cube corners any light hitting them is reflected back in precisely the same direction it came from. The distance to the moon can be calculated to within a few mm in 350000 km. The idea was to test Einstein's theory of general relativity which had been used to model the moons orbit. This apparatus is still there and is still used regularly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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