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Spent 3 weeks trying to debunk that moon landing mirror myth

I got into a debate online with someone who claimed the Apollo retroreflectors are fake because we can't see them from Earth. I figured I'd prove them wrong in an afternoon, but it took me 21 days to find a single credible NASA paper from 1970 that actually measured laser returns at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. It was way more complicated than I thought because you have to account for atmospheric distortion and the moon's libration. Anyone else run into a simple-sounding conspiracy that turned into a deep research hole?

2 comments

2 Comments

drew_grant5214d ago

I read somewhere those mirrors actually need a powerful laser just to get a faint signal back.

shah.shane13d ago

Man, tell me about it. That faint signal thing is exactly what tripped me up too. I found out you basically need a laser that can punch through the atmosphere with a beam only a few kilometers wide by the time it reaches the moon, and the detector has to be perfectly timed to catch just a handful of photons coming back. It's wild because the retroreflectors themselves are tiny, like each one is only a few feet across, and the laser pulse spreads out so much that by the time it hits the moon, it's covering an area bigger than a city. So you're literally waiting for a few specks of light to bounce off a little mirror and come back to a telescope, while the whole setup has to fight against clouds and the earth's own atmosphere blurring everything. Really makes you appreciate how much effort goes into measuring something that sounds so simple on paper.