> This is humorous thread that's designed to release the
> tension after another not-so-humorous thread. Harmless fun at
> this point. Personally, I'm having fun watching all these
> folks geek out! ;-}
>
> Paul
Ok, then let me throw this one out on the table. It's not quite as
difficult, but I think (of course) would garner an equal amount of cool
geek points. I've read that on one of the Apollo missions they left a
retro reflector on the moon. I've also seen that at the University of
New Mexico, they had set up a laser to bounce a beam off the reflector
and measure the distance to the moon.
I have a two stage proposal:
1) to replicate the above experiment and be able to accurately measure
the distance to the moon to an accuracy of 1ns (.98 ft).
2) with a round trip delay of 2.68 sec, to encode the beam with data in
a regenerative loop. Depending on just how fast you can modulate, you
should be able to attain a storage density of several Gigabytes to
possibly a Terabyte or more with a mean access of 1.3 sec.
I've got a 60mW Argon laser that might be able to make the trip and I
have a domain name registered for a project blog 'moonbounce.org'. Need
a telescope (12" Cassegrain would work well), EO modulators, appropriate
photo detection, clocking system with nanosecond resolution that can
count for several seconds without a rollover and a Terabyte of test data
(anyone have any contacts at the Library of Congress?).
Todd
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