Ya’ll heard about lunar laser ranging last week: them laser legends can now bounce enough photons off the moon to calculate its distance to within a few millimetres (we’re still waitin’ to hear how many millimetres it is)
This week, Victor “Brum” Brumberg at the Institute of Applied Astronomy in St Petersburg, Russia, and chums have worked out why this is useful: so we can land humans on the moon (nobody’s told Brum Brum that we done that already but no matter.)
Brum Brum’s dream is that we use the distance measurements to calculate the moon’s orbit to the precision required by general relativity. In fact the measurements are so accurate they could provide a test of relativity.
The new data will also allow us to go a-landin and explorin on the surface with unprecedented accuracy. And when we can do that we can plant shinier reflectors on the surface (the last one’s were left by Armstrong and co). That’ll give us even better measurements presumably allowing us to land with even more precision and so on in an infinite progression of lunar tomfoolery.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.1450: Prospects in the Orbital and Rotational Dynamics of the Moon with the Advent of Sub-centimeter Lunar Laser Ranging