Definition
The laser ranging consists in determining the round-trip travel time of laser pulses between a transmitter on the Earth and a retroreflector on an artificial satellite or on the Moon. The round-trip travel time is converted to a distance measurement based on a light speed determination in the given atmospheric conditions (temperature, pressure, and humidity).
Introduction
The lunar laser ranging (LLR) experiment had its origins in the late 1950s in the gravitational research program at Princeton University. R. H. Dicke and his co-workers were considering ways to look for possible slow changes in the gravitational constant G by precision tracking of a very dense artificial satellite in a high-altitude orbit. In 1962, L. D. Smullin and G. Fiocco, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), succeeded in observing laser light pulses reflected from the lunar surface. In 1963, Graszuk from the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory reported the same kind of measurements. Later,...
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References
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Torre, JM., Chabé, J. (2020). Laser Ranging. In: Cudnik, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Lunar Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05546-6_155-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05546-6_155-1
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