[Laser] Mona Lisa Transmitted to the Moon via Laser

[Tim Toast]

Les,
Very interesting article. I wonder what power they were using - 
I saw a video of the telescope sending the pulses and just from 
the looks of the beam, it may be several watts - and no telling 
the peak power in the pulses, which is much greater no doubt. 
Data rates of 300 bits per second = at least 300 pulses per 
second i'm guessing. Optically tracking a satellite in lunar 
orbit sounds very difficult. Just getting the beam to land on a 
certain area on the moon consistently requires a fairly expensive
telescope mount. A lot of these mounts available to amature 
astronomers are software controlled, so maybe it's not out of 
the question for them to be used like this as long as the extra 
orbital numbers are available to plug into the software used.