Todd Robinson wrote:
>>This is humorous thread that's designed to release the
>>tension after another not-so-humorous thread. Harmless fun at
>>this point. Personally, I'm having fun watching all these
>>folks geek out! ;-}
>>
>>Paul
>
>
> Ok, then let me throw this one out on the table. It's not quite as
> difficult, but I think (of course) would garner an equal amount of cool
> geek points. I've read that on one of the Apollo missions they left a
> retro reflector on the moon. I've also seen that at the University of
> New Mexico, they had set up a laser to bounce a beam off the reflector
> and measure the distance to the moon.
>
I have always wanted to see that for myself (and no, it is not because I
think that the moon landings were staged in a warehouse in New Mexico).
> I have a two stage proposal:
>
> 1) to replicate the above experiment and be able to accurately measure
> the distance to the moon to an accuracy of 1ns (.98 ft).
>
> 2) with a round trip delay of 2.68 sec, to encode the beam with data in
> a regenerative loop. Depending on just how fast you can modulate, you
> should be able to attain a storage density of several Gigabytes to
> possibly a Terabyte or more with a mean access of 1.3 sec.
>
I think that Wired just had an article on freespace laser communication
devices. It might be worth a read.
> I've got a 60mW Argon laser that might be able to make the trip and I
> have a domain name registered for a project blog 'moonbounce.org'. Need
> a telescope (12" Cassegrain would work well), EO modulators, appropriate
> photo detection, clocking system with nanosecond resolution that can
> count for several seconds without a rollover and a Terabyte of test data
> (anyone have any contacts at the Library of Congress?).
>
No, but I should have the entire SLUG mailing list from day 1 in my IMAP
server. I bet I have .5 TB of off-topic messages and .5 TB of people
complaining about off-topic messages. Will that suffice?
--ronan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:02:09 EDT