Re: [Re: [amsat-bb] Re: Moon-based amateur radio transponder]

["Lau, Zack, W1VT" <w1vt@xxxxxxxx>]

 Bruce Bostwick N5VB wrote:

>Well, but the point is it's a passive reflector.  And a very 
>inefficient one.  The lunar surface itself doesn't reflect laser light 
>very well, and if you shine a laser beam at the moon and look for the 
>beam spot in a boresight-mounted telescope, chances are you won't see 
>much.  But if some of your beam happens to hit the array of 
>retroreflectors set up on Apollo 14 (I think), you'll see a bright 
>flash even though that array is only a foot or two square.

Wow, what sort of laser did you use to see the flash of light?

The lasers used by professional observatories produce very weak return
signals--they use integration times of several hours.

"Nevertheless, there is enough dispersion of the beam that it 
is about 7 kilometers in diameter when it reaches the Moon and 
20 kilometers in diameter when it returns to Earth. "
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/expmoon/Apollo11/A11_Experiments_LRRR.html

It was the Apollo 11 mission.

Zack Lau W1VT
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