The point about useful data is mine. Just because you can bounce the light off it and show you can see it again is an interesting thing indeed, but it’s not useful. You can turn your porch light on and off and send Morse code to your neighbour 2 miles away, but it’s more useful to send that light down a fibre optic cable and send an easy to read post on the internet. Both are doable but one is infinitely more useful than the other.
People use it as proof that we sent reflectors to the moon, so the fact that we can bounce laser off the moon even without any reflectors placed there, is useful, as it debunks about the last proof that people cling to, regarding that man landed spacecrafts on the moon.
The need for specialized ultra sensitive equipment in the case of the 1962 laser bouncing and not needing that same specialized equipment after the reflector seems to prove otherwise.
You could test this yourself. Take a laser of the needed wattage and shine it randomly at the moon, measure your findings of the reflected light and then aim at the reflector that’s up there and measure how much different it is. The former may prove challenging compared to the latter as amateur astronomers can hit the reflector and track how much father the moon is moving from us year after year, where the former needs ultra sensitive equipment.
The point about useful data is mine. Just because you can bounce the light off it and show you can see it again is an interesting thing indeed, but it’s not useful. You can turn your porch light on and off and send Morse code to your neighbour 2 miles away, but it’s more useful to send that light down a fibre optic cable and send an easy to read post on the internet. Both are doable but one is infinitely more useful than the other.
People use it as proof that we sent reflectors to the moon, so the fact that we can bounce laser off the moon even without any reflectors placed there, is useful, as it debunks about the last proof that people cling to, regarding that man landed spacecrafts on the moon.
The need for specialized ultra sensitive equipment in the case of the 1962 laser bouncing and not needing that same specialized equipment after the reflector seems to prove otherwise. You could test this yourself. Take a laser of the needed wattage and shine it randomly at the moon, measure your findings of the reflected light and then aim at the reflector that’s up there and measure how much different it is. The former may prove challenging compared to the latter as amateur astronomers can hit the reflector and track how much father the moon is moving from us year after year, where the former needs ultra sensitive equipment.
Any equipment that is able to detect a single photon is ultra sensitive.