Marcolin
23.4K posts
The Lunar Laser Ranging Retroreflector (LRRR) is incontrovertible proof that Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. Of course, “incontrovertible” means nothing to moon landing deniers - MoLDs - will simply wave their hands and recite the same tired script that someone else prepared for them decades ago. I will go into detail below and in a second comment (due to length), but suffice it to say that at this point, the MoLDs have already rolled their eyes and begun preparing their standard replies. Some will respond with the exact points I am about to address below - having either ignored them, failed to understand them, or chosen willful ignorance. Others will simply skip past this entirely and retreat to their other tired and familiar talking points. That is, of course, typical. But I am hoping that others will enjoy this breakdown and utter debunking of moon landing denial. TL;DR: • A precision laser retroreflector is sitting on the Moon exactly where Apollo 11 placed it • Independent observatories have been measuring returns from it for decades • The signal is fundamentally different from random surface reflections • No other nation had the capability or motive to place it there in 1969 • It’s still working today 🧵1/2 Now, Let’s walk through it fully: On July 21, 1969, Buzz Aldrin carefully placed and precisely aligned the LRRR at Tranquility Base, orienting it to face Earth. This was not a device you could simply drop or plop into place. The alignment had to be deliberate and accurate - the device had to be leveled to within 0.5 degrees of the local vertical and pointed toward Earth. Aldrin accomplished this using a gnomon - a sundial-like instrument that casts a shadow onto a leveling scale - to achieve that precision on uneven lunar regolith. The retroreflector has a very narrow field of view - it is not like a mirror that works from any angle. If it were poorly placed or misaligned, the laser beam from Earth would miss it entirely or return nothing usable. No robotic lander in 1969 possessed the dexterity to perform that kind of tilt-and-level calibration on an uneven surface. This required human hands. Before Apollo 11 left the lunar surface, the reflector was tested and confirmed operational. Since 1969, multiple independent observatories and universities around the world have been bouncing lasers off that reflector - none of them NASA operations: • McDonald Observatory, University of Texas at Austin • Apache Point Observatory, New Mexico • Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur (Grasse station), France • Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii • Matera Laser Ranging Observatory, Italy Universities and research institutions across multiple nations - all getting the same unmistakable signal from the exact same location where Buzz Aldrin placed that reflector over fifty years ago. 1/2 🧵 continues …
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