

UC San Diego Physicists Locate Long Lost Soviet Reflector on Moon - bensummers
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/04-26SovietReflector.asp

======
gjm11
"In the coming months, he estimates it will be possible to establish the
reflector’s coordinates to better than one-centimeter precision."

On the _moon_.

~~~
kylemathews
And some days I can't even find my keys :)

~~~
ovi256
Well, if you'd spend 4 years of undergraduate education on key related
studies, then 3 to 5 years on key-finding PhD research, then all your life on
the same subject, I'm sure you'd be able to get millimeter accuracy on your
keys position ! That, and the help of a rich key-finding research community
and literature.

That being said, anything mood/astronomy/physics related is freaking awesome,
so yeah, the _moon_ people.

------
jcdreads
> "The best signal we’ve seen from Lunokhod 2 in several years of effort is
> 750 return photons, but we got about 2,000 photons from Lunokhod 1 on our
> first try."

I was trained as a physicist and I'm _still_ impressed by astronomers' ability
to learn things from countably small numbers of individual photons that make
it through a telescope.

------
whimsy
"Lunokhod 1, by virtue of its location, would provide the best leverage for
understanding the liquid lunar core..."

The moon has a liquid core?! Why was I not informed?

