ScienceNostalgia101 Posted July 1, 2021 Posted July 1, 2021 And if so, would any telescope pointed at the moon be, in turn, de facto surveillance of any position on the face of the Earth? (For good or for ill; anyone looking to misuse this technology would probably come up with it independent of our discussion so best we discuss whether it'd work before we come to any conclusions on whether it'd be something that'd need to be stopped if useful.) I ask this because I was recently thinking about this involving their counterpart in the form of concave mirrors: Which while the image quality isn't ideal, one can still get a rough idea of what is going on in the reflected image. I'm trying to picture how anyone looking to do this would achieve it on a larger scale. Melting moon rock until gravity forces it into a spherical shape? And if that isn't reflective enough on its own, shipping aluminum foil or some other reflective material into space until its trajectory lays it onto the surface of the moon? Would the kind of chemical reactions that deposit silver evenly work in an environment without oxygen? If so how many microns thick would the silver layer need to be in order to reflect light? Would this be too prohibitively expensive for any corporation and/or government to think worth it?
swansont Posted July 1, 2021 Posted July 1, 2021 Convex and concave mirrors give very different results. Of what utility is a mirror — quite far from the earth — whose magnification is less than 1? Also, getting the surface smooth enough to be a substrate for a mirror isn't going to happen.
Janus Posted July 1, 2021 Posted July 1, 2021 This is what the Moon as a mirror would look like viewed from the Earth with a telescope. That small bluish dot in the center is the Earth's reflection.
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