Now this is science! Students at the Liceo Scientifico “A. Vallisneri” in Lucca, Italy determined that there was an echo of the earth transmissions in recordings of conversations with lunar astronauts.
They noticed an echo on this recording in which sentences from Earth are retransmitted via Armstrong’s helmet speaker through his microphone and back to Earth. They used the open source audio editing program Audacity to measure the echo’s delay which turned out to be 2.620 secs and used this to work out the distance to the moon as 3.93 x 10^8 metres.
This is a modern version of repeating Kepler’s method of determining the orbit of mars – real science well within the realm of your every day high school students.
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