What do you get when you combine the Moon , a recently rediscovered forty - year - sometime Soviet probe , and a laser ? The most precise lunar measurements ever made – and , just for the hell of it , a way of life to prove Einstein right … or wrong .
Although it got a mo lost in the hoopla of the groovy achievement in the history of human geographic expedition – Apollo 11 to its friends – the Lunokhod 1 probe was one of the greatest succeeder of the Soviet space program . Carried to the Moon by the Luna 17 rocket in 1970 , Lunokhod 1 ( which means “ Moonwalker ” ) was the first remote - controlled robot put on the surface of another celestial consistency . The scouter traveled seven miles across the lunar surface during its eleven months of military operation , sending back rafts of goggle box images and gamy - resolution pictures during its tour .
When contact with Lunokhod 1 was lost , so was its positioning , and it remained missing for forty class until NASA ’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter happened to spot it in one of its images of the lunar surface . This opened up the opening of restore impinging with the former rover using the laser retroreflector placed on Lunokhod 1 . Astronomer Tom Murphy of the University of California San Diego used the telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to commit laser light pulses to the rover ’s lunar coordinates .
They straightaway sire two thousand photons sent back – a shockingly readable response for a rover so previous and removed . It ’s so strong that they can even send and receive signal during lunar daylight , antecedently thought to be impossible . Indeed , the strength of the comeback signaling dwarfs those of the four other lunar reflector already in economic consumption : those left by three Apollo mission and another on Lunokhod 2 , a replacement delegacy sent to the Moon in 1973 .
All five reflectors apply recession mirror applied science , which allows the reflecting telescope to find a laser signal and dissipate it back on a parallel flight to the original pulse . This means it ’s possible to calculate the exact space between the observatory telescope and the lunar reflector , with measuring potential to the near mm .
Lunokhod 1 now conjoin its young brother and the American reflector in the last Apollo experiment still in cognitive operation , which aims to use these radical - exact measuring of the space between the Earth and the Moon to graph the lunar compass with entire preciseness over the descend months and days . This is n’t just a matter of cosmic bookkeeping – this special Apollo experiment is testing whether Einstein ’s Theory of General Relativity really is borne out by empiric watching .
The other four signals were n’t inviolable enough for this experimentation to move forward , but with the shockingly secure Lunokhod 1 as the novel centerpiece of the operation , the great experiment can now at last begin . So far , the results show Einstein has nothing to vex about , but either fashion a once lost little Soviet investigation is the key to march whether the possibility of somberness really is everything it ’s cracked up to be .
[ NASA ]
AstronomyMad astronomyNASAScienceSpace
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