[Laser] NASA finds 40 year-old Soviet Laser Reflector on the Moon

[bernies at netaxs.com]

The Russians probably knew where their reflector was all this time.   
They landed robots on the mood before the USA got there, looked  
around, and decided the moon wasn't worth spending a lot more money on.

-Ed


http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/scienceshot-decades-old-soviet-r.html

It?s gotta be around here somewhere! No one had seen a laser reflector  
that Soviet scientists had left on the moon almost 40 years ago,  
despite years of searching. Turns out searchers had been looking  
kilometers in the wrong direction. On 22 April, a team of physicists  
finally saw an incredibly faint flash from the reflector, which was  
ferried across the lunar surface by the Lunokhod 1 rover (inset). The  
find comes thanks to NASA?s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which last  
month imaged a large area where the rover was reported to have been  
left. Then the researchers, led by Tom Murphy of the University of  
California, San Diego, could search one football-field-size area at a  
time until they got a reflection. Using their laser on the 3.5-meter  
telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico like a radar,  
they immediately measured the distance from Earth to the reflector to  
within a centimeter. Now the team can eventually pin down the changing  
shape of the lunar orbit to the millimeter to help test Einstein?s  
theory of general relativity.