{"id":77,"date":"2007-10-20T00:57:55","date_gmt":"2007-10-20T05:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=77"},"modified":"2007-10-20T01:02:09","modified_gmt":"2007-10-20T06:02:09","slug":"more-on-moon-measurements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=77","title":{"rendered":"More on Moon measurements"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ya&#8217;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 (<a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=72\">we&#8217;re still waitin&#8217; to hear how many millimetres it is<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>This week, Victor &#8220;Brum&#8221; 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&#8217;s told Brum Brum that we done that already but no matter.)<\/p>\n<p>Brum Brum&#8217;s dream is that we use the distance measurements to calculate the moon&#8217;s orbit to the precision required by general relativity. In fact the measurements are so accurate they could provide a test of relativity.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s were left by Armstrong and co). That&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Ref:  <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0710.1450\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0710.1450<\/a>: Prospects in the Orbital and Rotational Dynamics of the Moon with the Advent of Sub-centimeter Lunar Laser Ranging<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ya&#8217;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&#8217;re still waitin&#8217; to hear how many millimetres it is) This week, Victor &#8220;Brum&#8221; Brumberg at the Institute of Applied Astronomy in St Petersburg, Russia, and chums [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hellraisin","category-stars-in-their-eyes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}