Article Abstracts | May 2006
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Seconds of Data … YEARS OF TRYING
A scientist in a space project offers a personal account of the story behind a groundbreaking laser-ranging experiment across 24 million kilometers.
by Maria T. Zuber, MIT and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
In late May 2005, my colleagues and I performed the first two-way laser link over an interplanetary distance.1 In doing so, we set the record for the longest distance over which a laser pulse has been detected.
Not long after the experiment, I attended a meeting with MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield. She congratulated me, saying that she had understood that we had succeeded at doing something that was both important and very difficult. That said, she asked if I could explain why it had taken so long to get the experiment to work. At that time, we had been at it, on and off, for 13 years...
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