Word: lasered
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From an equipment bay on the other side of the LM, the busy spacemen will remove EASEP (for Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Payload). They will set up one part of the package?a laser-beam reflector?some 70 ft. from the LM. The other experiment, a seismometer for measuring moonquakes and meteor impacts, will be placed 10 ft. farther away. Both will be left on the moon for the benefit of earthbound scientists (see following section...
...make precise measurements of the wobbling of the earth on its axis. This motion, called Chandler's Wobble, should tend to damp out with the passage of time, but is periodically reinforced by unknown forces?possibly earthquakes. More accurate measurements of the wobble with the aid of the laser reflector might someday lead to a technique for earthquake prediction...
Another terrestrial phenomenon?continental drift?could be confirmed by the lunar laser experiment. Periodically measuring the distance between the moon and lasers beamed from fixed points in Africa and South America, scientists will use triangulation to determine whether the distance between the two continents is gradually increasing...
...astronauts will also leave behind a laser reflector pointed toward the earth. The reflector actually consists of an array of 100 quartz corner reflectors, so called because they are shaped like the corner of a cube or a room. Each reflector has a valuable characteristic: it will reflect a beam of light directly back to the source. Thus light aimed at the lunar reflector from a laser located in Los Angeles, for instance, will bounce directly back to Los Angeles...
...timing the round trip of the laser beam, scientists will be able to fix the distance between the earth and the moon at any time to within 6 in. of the exact figure. This precise measuring rod should help answer a number of vexing scientific questions. By revealing previously unmeasurable variations in the orbit of the moon, for example, it should provide a better understanding of the nature of gravity. For if scientists can determine precisely how much the moon's orbit is increasing each year, they may finally be able to confirm?or disprove?the theory that the force...