How High the Moon

How High the Moon
　　He wants to know it within a millimeter, and that's less than a 25th of an inch.And he wants to know exactly how far it is every moment of every dayStainless steel pipe Stainless steel tube gelatin capsules hydraulic winch ugg. That'sdespite the fact that the distance changes minute by minute because the moon is in an elliptical 28-day orbit ranging from 220,000 to about 252,000 miles from Earth.
　　To achieve his goal, the University of Washington postdoctoral researcher in physics and astronomy will use the latest in laser technology, a large telescope in New Mexico, a team of other expertsugg boots ugg tall geomembrane louis vuitton bag ugg classic cardy, a little funding from NASA, and a whole lot of luck.
　　The stakes are high. If it doesn't workcheap ugg cardy boots ugg cardy boots grey ugg cardy boots black pandora beads louis vuitton, he could spend the rest of his life trying to live down "Murphy's folly." If it does, he might disprove part of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, or he might discover evidence of an unseen celestial body in our solar system, either of which would earn him a page in the history bookslouis vuitton handbags ugg boots uk louis vuitton bags ugg boots on sale louis vuitton wallets. What Murphy is really doing is using the Earth and the moon as his laboratory, because the questions he is asking can't be answered in an ordinary lab. The tools just aren't big enough.
Murphy’s primary method will be something called "laser ranginglouis vuitton wallet gucci gucci handbags gucci handbag gucci bags."Light from a laser fired from the Earth could hit a reflector on the surface of the moon and bounce back. The time it took for the light to travel from Earth to the reflector and back would reveal the exact distance, or at least within a few inchesgucci bag gucci wallets louis vuitton handbag ugg boots ugg sundance. That would reveal much about the lunar orbit, and that data could in turn be used to test some of the tantalizing ideas in Einstein's theories.
　　By using a laser system mounted on a 3.5-meter telescope at Apache Point, N.M.,and equipped with a sophisticated array of detectors that can capture and isolate every photon of light that bounces back from the moonugg classic boots ugg boots on sale ugg cardy boots ugg classic cardy boots ugg classic cardy, Murphy hopes to get the number down well below a millimeter.
　　The laser will blast a 1-billion-watt "bullet" of light at the moon 20 times every secondcheap ugg cardy boots ugg cardy boots grey ugg classic cardy boots ugg ugg cardy boots. But the Earth's atmosphere will distort the beam once it leaves the telescope, so by the time it gets to the moon the beam will cover an area more than a mile wide. Murphy is hoping that at least one out of every 30 million photons hits a reflector and bounces back toward Earthugg cardy cheap ugg boots ugg classic tall ugg boots uk ugg boot. That would send about a billion photons back from each bullet.
　　But by the time the reflected laser beam reaches Earthugg tall ugg sundance gucci shoes ugg cardy boots black air mass sensor , it will have spread out to nearly 10 miles in diameter, so probably only about one out of 30 million reflected protons will actually be captured by the detectors. That data will be fed into a powerful computer, but all it will tell is the distance between the telescope and the reflector.