>>13605280Ok I think this is right.
So a laser is sent to the moon, and it takes 2.6 seconds to return.
In 2.6 seconds, the earth turns, enough that the laser hits 477 meters away from where it was shot. We can just round this to about 500 meters.
So the only way they could possibly detect the laser: if the laser spreads out a lot over distance. So you get a weak signal on the border of the main signal, because a columnar laser spreads out over distance.
But the problem is, if the laser spreads bey 500 meters, that means it's creating a minimum of 250 meter radius when it hits the moon. 250 meter radius is pretty huge, much bigger than a tiny retro-reflector. In fact I would say we are greatly discounting ourselves, it's probably a radius of miles.
We know the moon's surface will tend to bounce a signal in many different directions, because it's not perfectly reflective. It's not a mirror.
But it is reflective enough to send enough of a signal back towards earth. I mean, if the retroreflector is 1 meter x 1 meter, and the soil that is impacted by the laser is 250x250 = 62,500 square meters.....that means the amount of signal the soil would have to return is 1/62,500 compared to the signal sent back by the retroreflector.
So the signal we are getting back is probably not from the reflector at all, it's probably bouncing from the soil itself. The white surface of the moon is known to reflect tons of sunlight to the earth, it's not improbable at all that it's sending enough of a laser signal back towards earth to be detected.
