This optical retroreflector was left on the Moon by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Since then, astronomers from all over the world have bounced laser light off the reflectors to measure precisely the Earth-Moon distance. Now NASA is funding an effort to deploy 'next-generation' retroreflectors on the lunar surface, potentially improving the precision of the measurement by a factor of 100. Photo: NASA. |
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