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Since Jarrah couldn’t come up with any good reasons why NASA’s moon rocks should be
discredited, the rest of this series is totally unnecessary.
But, just to be thorough, let’s examine his Lunar Laser Ranging claims.
Jarrah: As you know, the Americans only placed three.
The odd one out was left by the Russians.
Jerry Wiant, McDonald Observatory: “We fire a laser at this spot and two others -
three others on the moon.”
Jarrah: Wiant’s statement not only contradicts the claim that Russia failed to get a working
retro-reflector to the moon but also the claim that you couldn’t do this with an unmanned craft.
Of course, it has become apparent that an unmanned probe wouldn’t have been needed
to bounce lasers off the moon, nor would you need a manned craft for that matter.
Jarrah, of course, is jumping all over the place on this topic.
He starts with a straw man, claiming that propagandists say that the Soviets never put
a WORKING reflector on the moon.
I have no idea where he got that.
Even Jarrah’s favorite source, Wikipedia, talks about the TWO Soviet unmanned missions
that carried small arrays to the moon.
He then skips past another common conspiracists’ claim that a manned mission was not required
to place reflectors on the moon.
And then he dives headlong into his main argument, that reflectors are not even needed to bounce
lasers off the moon.
Notice, he doesn’t come right out and say that the reflectors are not really there,
or that they’re not used, just that you don’t need them.
And Jarrah apparently doesn’t like the idea that Mister Roboto could have placed the reflectors,
because that would require computers to navigate to the moon and down to the lunar surface
and to control the robots once they land.
These would be the same computers that conspiracists claim didn’t exist, didn’t work, couldn’t
be programmed, whatever, and thus could not have been used on manned missions, even though
the Soviet Luna probes and the US Surveyor missions both needed some form of navigation
computers to get to the moon.
The Apollo 11 crew placed the first lunar reflector in 1969.
And yet, the first lasers were bounced off the moon in 1962, a good 7 years before the
first moon landing.
This is documented in the National Geographic, and yet, they sold this lemon to the world
when they chose to air their revised version of this Zig Zag Productions documentary
Understandably, not a single propagandist from any pro-NASA website, makes any mention
of this documented fact.
Instead, they all insist that, quote: “If there was nothing at that point but rock,
that would be the last you would see of your laser.”
Here, Jarrah assumes that by not mentioning something; that is as good as saying that
it didn’t happen, which of course makes all propagandists liars, especially RedZero
and everyone at Zig Zag Productions.
Chalk this up as yet another straw man.
The Yanks bounced lasers off the moon in 1962 and the Soviets responded to their challenge
a year later.
So what?
Actually, the idea of bouncing any kind of electromagnetic waves off the moon was NOT
a new idea in 1962.
Scientists at Evans Signal Laboratory, in New Jersey, bounced the first radar signals
off the moon shortly after moonrise, January 10, 1946.
By measuring the time delay between the transmission of the signal and the returning ping, they
were able to verify the approximate distance to the moon.
In the fifties, they were able to determine the average distance to the moon with an accuracy
of about 1km by taking multiple measurements over several months time.
These early radar experiments lead to EME, or Earth-Moon-Earth communications, which
was originally developed for the military, but proved impractical - the moon has to be
visible at both ends for it to work - and it was later picked up by amateur radio enthusiasts
who have been bouncing signals off the moon since 1953.
Now, the unfortunate consequence of using radar or radio waves is that reflections from
the lunar surface are scattered in all directions and different angles and as a result the returning
signal is much weaker and much more spread out than when it started.
So, when Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first working laser on May 16, 1960, it was
not long until scientists began to contemplate a way to bounce this tightly focused beam
of photons off the lunar disk.
On the evenings of May 9 through May 11, 1962, Louis D. Smullin and Giorgio Fiocco
shot a ruby laser at the moon and measured the reflected photons.
The Soviets were successful in duplicating the American experiment at the Crimean Astrophysical
Observatory in September 1963.
In these experiments, the scientists shot several 500us bursts of 694.3nm photons at
the moon.
The bursts diverged somewhat on their 385-thousand km trip to the moon and lit up an area about
6 km across.
As little as 7% of the light was reflected from the lunar surface and came nearly straight
back to earth, covering an area up to 25 km across.
About 2.5 seconds after firing the laser, the scientists started counting the number
of 694.3nm photons that hit a photocell during a 500us window.
This is called Geiger mode, where you simply count the number of clicks detected by the
sensor during the exposure window, like a Geiger counter.
Of course, the moon reflects light of that wavelength all the time.
So, between bursts, the scientists would expose the photocell for 10.0 or 12.5ms to count
the normal number of random photons - the background noise.
This is what their raw data looked like.
The Americans performed a total of 70 control trials (meaning no laser bursts), averaging
1.36 random photons per theoretical 500us window.
They also performed 80 test trials (meaning with laser bursts), averaging 1.91 photons
per each true 500us window.
The difference is 0.55 counts, which means that they received 40% more photons of the
correct wavelength from the moon after firing the laser, than when they didn’t.
So, how do we determine if this difference is significant?
Since the scientists were counting things, the number of events during intervals, we
would expect their data to fit a Poisson distribution.
A quick check to determine if the Poisson is valid is simply to see if the data has
equal mean and variance.
In this case, we see that the mean and variance are virtually identical for each trial, so
the Poisson is the way to go.
The scientists would have analyzed their data this way.
On May 9, for example, they checked the noise level 15 times and calculated an average of
1.11 photons per each theoretical 500us control window.
They also fired 11 laser bursts and counted 21 photons [total] during those capture windows.
If the photons received in the capture windows were all random light, they would have expected
an average [total] of only 12.21 photons during those 11 exposures.
Their null hypothesis, that the 21 photons they counted were from a Poisson distribution
with an expected mean of 12.21 photons, has a probability less than 1.5% - meaning the
null hypothesis is not very likely.
But that’s a good thing!
If you look down the rightmost column of this chart, you’ll notice that no night had a
probability in favor of the null hypothesis any higher than 10%.
So, they could reject the null hypothesis.
Looking at it another way, every night they fired their laser at the moon, they were at
least 90% confident they were detecting the laser beam bouncing off the moon.
That’s not perfect, but it made the experiment a success.
And according to a 1964 publication by the Royal Astronomy Society, by taking multiple
laser measurements on roughly the same area on the moon over a long period of time, it
should be possible to calculate the AVERAGE distance to that area, with a fraction of
a KILOMETER accuracy, which beats the radar experiments of the fifties.
But, even as tightly focused as the beam was, it still spread out over an area up to 30-million
square meters.
And, since the lunar terrain is not exactly flat anywhere, even in the mares, there could
be better than a kilometer in height difference in what the photons bounced off of.
So, scientists, being what they are, began to dream about putting something on the moon
that could do a better job of reflecting the laser beams and make their readings more consistent.
Since we’re barely halfway through this story, I think I’ll break here and finish
it in the next video.
Ciao moon hoax conspirators, wherever you are.