UC San Diego Physicists Locate Long Lost Soviet Reflector on Moon

ucsdnews.ucsd.edu

24 points·bensummers··7 comments

"In the coming months, he estimates it will be possible to establish the reflector’s coordinates to better than one-centimeter precision."

On the moon.

Quite impressive, isn't it?

And some days I can't even find my keys :)

> “It turns out we were searching around a position miles from the rover,” said Murphy.

This guy should make a law about improbable things happening ;)

Well, if you'd spend 4 years of undergraduate education on key related studies, then 3 to 5 years on key-finding PhD research, then all your life on the same subject, I'm sure you'd be able to get millimeter accuracy on your keys position ! That, and the help of a rich key-finding research community and literature.

That being said, anything mood/astronomy/physics related is freaking awesome, so yeah, the moon people.

> "The best signal we’ve seen from Lunokhod 2 in several years of effort is 750 return photons, but we got about 2,000 photons from Lunokhod 1 on our first try."

I was trained as a physicist and I'm still impressed by astronomers' ability to learn things from countably small numbers of individual photons that make it through a telescope.

"Lunokhod 1, by virtue of its location, would provide the best leverage for understanding the liquid lunar core..."

The moon has a liquid core?! Why was I not informed?

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