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Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: Lunar Laser Ranging

*Deserves a thread of its own:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.htm … 6310]Still goin' strong 35+ years later...

Three of them installed by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 astronauts.  One was built by France and delivered via the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover. 

Testing Einstein's general theory of relativity, and also theories by Galileo and Newton.

Newton published a supporting explanation in 1687 in his Principia, and Einstein extended the principle nearly 100 years ago.  Einstein's premise, called the strong equivalence principle, holds that all forms of matter accelerate at the same rate in response to gravity. This principle became a foundation of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

The Lunar Laser Ranging experiment confirms that the Moon and Earth "fall toward" the Sun at the same rate, even though Earth has a large iron core below its rocky mantle, while the Moon is mostly rocky with a much smaller core...

"Lunar laser ranging can conduct very accurate tests of gravity and fundamental physics," said Williams

Mentions possible future applications on Mars, etc.

--Cindy

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 29,024

Re: Lunar Laser Ranging

And yet we turned off many of the other sensors when we had thought we were all though..

Was not the gravity B probe to prove Einstein's theories and since its launch we have heard of satelite frame drag from earth geo sat's and now the use of very old reflectors and lasers being used to prove the same.