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I've been reading on how the distance to the moon is calculated by bouncing a laser signal on the retro-reflectors and measuring the time it takes the light to return to Earth, but what I've seen is that the retro-reflectors do a good job of minimizing scattering by returning the signal along the same direction in which it arrived.
Since the light takes approximately 2.5 seconds to reach the moon and back, and since being near the equator of the Earth, the rotational speed is about 1,600km/h on the surface or about 1.2km / 2.5s, so my question is how do the experimenters receive the signal if the retro-reflectors bounce the signal back to where the signal was first emitted which by that point is 1.2km off the mark?
Since the light takes approximately 2.5 seconds to reach the moon and back, and since being near the equator of the Earth, the rotational speed is about 1,600km/h on the surface or about 1.2km / 2.5s, so my question is how do the experimenters receive the signal if the retro-reflectors bounce the signal back to where the signal was first emitted which by that point is 1.2km off the mark?