Rehashing moon mentalness

originally posted by: Gargoyle91
a reply to: toysforadults

You can prove it to yourself - Lunar Laser Ranging experiment , The reflectors are there.

originally posted by: ErosA433
a reply to: Gargoyle91

Aye, actually they do that experiment occasionally for Astro demos at the Uni I am working for

I find the claim "You can prove it to yourself" somewhat dubious. We can watch the experiment performed on mythbusters where they point out that the laser being used is 100 billion times more powerful than your typical laser pointer some of us have. Is it realistic to expect anybody to get a laser 100 billion times more powerful to "prove it to themselves"? I'm not going to do it, but I can watch the mythbusters episode of it being done at the Apache point observatory, owned by the Astrophysical Research Consortium.

Mythbusters Moon Hoax Retroreflectors

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
I find the claim "You can prove it to yourself" somewhat dubious. We can watch the experiment performed on mythbusters where they point out that the laser being used is 100 billion times more powerful than your typical laser pointer some of us have. Is it realistic to expect anybody to get a laser 100 billion times more powerful to "prove it to themselves"? I'm not going to do it, but I can watch the mythbusters episode of it being done at the Apache point observatory, owned by the Astrophysical Research Consortium.

100s of Billions times more powerful?...How would one be cooling this planet destroying laser of mass destruction? O_O

About 2.3Watts for a laser, here's a cool short guide for the Lunar Range Experiment:

tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu...

originally posted by: MuonToGluon

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
I find the claim "You can prove it to yourself" somewhat dubious. We can watch the experiment performed on mythbusters where they point out that the laser being used is 100 billion times more powerful than your typical laser pointer some of us have. Is it realistic to expect anybody to get a laser 100 billion times more powerful to "prove it to themselves"? I'm not going to do it, but I can watch the mythbusters episode of it being done at the Apache point observatory, owned by the Astrophysical Research Consortium.

100s of Billions times more powerful?...How would one be cooling this planet destroying laser of mass destruction? O_O

About 2.3Watts for a laser, here's a cool short guide for the Lunar Range Experiment:

tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu...

I'm guessing the apparent discrepancy is one person is talking average power whilst the other is talking peak power, and both sources agree the laser is only emitted in extremely short pulses, so because of this even very high peak power can be achieved without any extraordinary cooling requirements. If the 2.3 Watts is accurate, I expect it's NOT referring to peak power which is what mythbusters referred to.

I ran across a similar discrepancy in power level claims for the LIGO gravitational wave detectors and it turns out they were talking about two different methods of measuring the power. The 200 watt laser was fed into a power recycling system using mirrors to build up to an effective million watts. So was it really 200 watts or really 1 million watts? As far as I can determine both power levels are correctly stated measurements using two different measurement methods.

Your link still requires access to a 14 million dollar telescope and since this is out of reach for the average person's budget my point stands that I find the claim "You can prove it to yourself" somewhat dubious regardless of what measurement method you use for laser power.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Oh I completely agree with you, even the cheapest system would require the use of Liquid Helium to cool it, even if you went through your University and borrowed it to throw onto your roof - expensive.

The strongest/most powerful laser we ever tested was one that was designed to be used in space for defense (one shot deal), it was tested underground with a nuke connected to it so it would tunnel the nukes radiation/x-rays to it in one big burst to knock out a missile/city etc - it would of been cool.