Word: smullin
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Dates: during 1962-1962
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Since laser light can be concentrated into a thin beam that barely spreads out at all, Professor Louis Smullin and Dr. Giorgio Fiocco, the M.I.T. engineers who performed the experiment, estimate that the laser's light diverged only about two-thirds of an inch for each mile of its quarter-million-mile journey to the moon. When it reached the moon's mountains, the laser beam lighted faintly a circular area only two miles in diameter...
...Smullin and Fiocco estimate that each of its 1/2,000-sec. flashes squirted 2 X 10 21 (200 billion trillion) photons of light toward the moon. Most of these tiny bits of light got there, but those reflected by the moon's rough, dark surface scattered widely. Only a few of them bounced back to Lincoln Lab. Bunched together by a 48-in. telescope, the returning photons were sent through a filter that passed only light of the laser's wave length. Then the photons were picked up by a sensitive photocell...