Corner Reflectors and Bonner - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

"As I went to Bonner, I met a pig without a wig, upon my word and honour." - Mother Goose rhyme

Upon my own word and honor, I once met an engineer, a living and breathing, bipedal, mammalian being, seemingly well educated in the sciences, who insisted that the entire Apollo space program was a fake and that nobody had ever actually landed on the moon. 

I told him how when Armstrong and Aldrin were at Tranquility Base, they installed a set of corner reflectors that are still there and which are still operational. NASA and other groups send pulsed laser beams to the reflectors which bounce the beams right back from whence they came. Measurements of the round trip transit times tell how far away the reflectors are and thus how far away the moon is.

He'd never even heard of corner reflectors, much to my further astonishment, so let's take a look at that.

Just for jollies, I made a corner reflector of sorts out of some aluminum foil. I photographed the thing first without and then with flash for lots of different orientations. The flash was always returned right back at me and to the camera, even as crude as the foil arrangement was:

 The underlying geometry can be illustrated in a two-dimensional sketch as follows:

 
Clearly, these things got put there by two human beings, not by little-green-men or bug-eyed-monsters so this guy started thinking that maybe the Apollo program was for real after all.

He was still not really one-hundred percent certain of that, but he was quite confident in the concepts set forth in "Chariots of the Gods" by Erich von Daniken because space alien visitors were an acceptable and logical explanation for so many other things. (Sigh.)

Comments

[Xtreme_Eng]

The Mythbusters debunked that conspiracy theory a couple a years ago. I think it's funny how some can go 30 or more years believing man landed on the moon and then after watching a 1 hour show all of sudden they think other wise. Some individuals are so gullible. I just tell them to watch the Mythbusters episode "The moon landing conspiracy theory" debunked. It's a great show.

[ZechTech]

I like the part where the conspiracy theory had the flag waving as proof of non-vacuum (wind blowing flag), but it actually could only occur in a vacuum (lack of air resistance let the flag oscillate).