Author Topic: Retroreflectors don't work, paper on Aulis Online  (Read 3963 times)

Offline TexMex

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Retroreflectors don't work, paper on Aulis Online
« on: November 22, 2018, 01:47:10 AM »
While talking to a Moon Hoax advocate about the laser range finding experiment, he presented excerpts from this paper: http://www.aulis.com/laser.htm  by Andreas Märki

The paper seems like an advanced version of standard moon hoax claims.  More emotions than facts.  And it seems to draw conclusions that are not supported.

I did some searching on the author and found a linked in profile that shows him currently self employed.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreas-märki-4b3b071a/

And another page that says he is a bus driver: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.erlibus.ch%2Fnode%2F4

Offline smartcooky

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Re: Retroreflectors don't work, paper on Aulis Online
« Reply #1 on: November 22, 2018, 04:59:10 AM »
Retroreflectors don't work?

Oh dear, this will be news to people who drive on the road at night....!

If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong.

Offline onebigmonkey

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Re: Retroreflectors don't work, paper on Aulis Online
« Reply #2 on: November 22, 2018, 05:04:46 AM »
He's also responsible for this page:

https://apollophotos.ch/

It's the same old same old.

Weirdly, the 'about the author' bit on that page makes no reference to either his alleged qualifications or his claimed career in the space industry.

Offline onebigmonkey

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Re: Retroreflectors don't work, paper on Aulis Online
« Reply #3 on: November 22, 2018, 05:08:09 AM »
Retroreflectors don't work?


I've skimmed the paper and it seems to be implying that the results you get from the retroreflectors are no better than from the lunar surface, with the conclusion that the reflectors are not there. The English is pretty mangled so it's difficult to tell what he's actually saying.

Offline Jason Thompson

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Re: Retroreflectors don't work, paper on Aulis Online
« Reply #4 on: November 22, 2018, 07:48:55 AM »
One big assumption stuck in the middle that undermines his entire calculation:

Quote
The field of view of the receiver is larger than the divergence of the transmit beam so that it can collect light from the whole illuminated area.

That's almost certainly true over the distances involved in the other laser ranging applications he lists, since they involve aircraft or satellites in orbit. Over lunar distances, however, that doesn't hold, because the transmitted beam is a lot wider than the receiver telescope back on Earth by the time it hits the lunar surface. He is essentially saying the number of photons returned by the relatively small retroreflectors is about the same as the number of photons returned from the bare lunar surface over the entire area of illumination. That actually pretty much confirms they are there!

In typical HB style he's done some maths based on a faulty premise. All he has done is ignore vast amounts of empirical data (his selected ranging stations will have had a lot of data available about the returned signal from the bare surface as well but he didn't bother to check) in order to show that reality doesn't match his expectations, then concluded, in typical HB style, that reality is at fault rather than re-examining his conclusion. The fact it took me all of a minute to find that single statement that undermines his whole argument, without even needing to go into the mathematics at all, shows a lot about his scientific rigour.

As, incidentally, does the fact it is self-published online with no peer review...
« Last Edit: November 22, 2018, 07:50:55 AM by Jason Thompson »
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Offline JayUtah

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Re: Retroreflectors don't work, paper on Aulis Online
« Reply #5 on: November 23, 2018, 03:04:47 PM »
The empirical verification comes in the form of shifting the laser slightly off-target and viewing the return in the appropriate wavelength.  It is non-existent.  Then you retarget the laser for the retroreflector and see that spike in the return.  They've demonstrated this on TV.  So yeah, just another self-proclaimed "expert" trying to steal a place in the sun.
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams

Offline ka9q

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Re: Retroreflectors don't work, paper on Aulis Online
« Reply #6 on: November 23, 2018, 07:25:48 PM »
Both the hoaxers and many of the anti-hoaxers keep missing an important point: what proves the existence of the reflectors isn't so much that we get returns from them, but that we get very short returns from very short outbound pulses. The shortness of these return pulses proves that the reflectors are physically small, less than one meter. That in turn proves that they're extremely reflective, and in turn, artificial.

Preserving short pulses was the whole point in flying them; although it's possible to get returns from the natural surface, they are considerably spread out in time by the rough lunar surface. This greatly limits their ranging accuracy that's the whole point for shooting lasers at the moon in the first place.