QUOTE(hazzard @ Aug 25 2005, 03:54 PM)
Anyone that denies this conclusion from the evidence is unlikely to be persuaded by a few more pictures....
hazzard is right,but pictures are redundent,we have the reflectors remember?
The reflectors are corner cubes, basically a prism that will reflect any light tht hits it directly back at the source. It's not really an unusual technology, it's used for car and bike reflectors as well as the cats-eyes on the road and in a lot of over applications. The Apollo reflectors were just much bigger, about a metre square.
The second trick is that while lasers are highly tight beams, over the distance that beam has spread out to around a kilometer in diameter, so it just needs to be roughly in the right area and whatever light hits the relector will be returned.
Because it doesn't nmatter what angle it hits the light is returned to the source, the positioning doesn't matter a great deal to the ability to reurn, but it does to the ammount of light. The USSR reflectors were placed by remote contolled rover and they aren't aligned properly so they hve a smaller profile and thus reflect less of the light because less light is able to hit them.
The Apollo reflectors were aligned by hand and so their full profile is hit returning a greater amount of the light.