Soviet Lunar Robot Returns First Laser Pulse To Earth In 40 Years

No the picture below isn't a steam punk hot tub, and it's not a prop left over from the Flash Gordon series either. The thing you see below if the Soviet lunar rover called Lunokhod 1. The rover was launched back in the Apollo-era and was reportedly one of the biggest successes of the Soviet lunar program.

In the years that followed its publicized landing in 1970, the Lunokhod 1 was forgotten about until the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found it again. A team of scientists from the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico has now been successful at hitting the Soviet rover's laser retroreflector and getting a signal bounced back to Earth.

Team member Tom Murphy from UC San Diego says that the first time they hit the old rover with a laser beam from the observatory they were able to get about 2,000 photos back from the Lunokhod 1. Murphy said, "The signal was so strong, my first thought was that our detector was acting up! I expected the rover's reflector to be degraded and dull after all this time, so I thought, 'this couldn't possibly be it.' But it was." The team is using the old retroreflector to precisely find the distance from the moon to the Earth along with other reflectors left behind by Apollo astronauts on the moon. The team is using the reflectors to try to find holes in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.