Last week, four Spanish students revealed how they had taken pictures
of the curvature of the Earth by attaching a digital camera to a helium
balloon and letting it go. When the British newspaper The Daily
Telegraph reported the work, the story snowballed, attracting worldwide
coverage.
Now a group of 30 Italian students from classes 1SD and 1SE at the Liceo Scientifico “A. Vallisneri” in Lucca, Italy have gone one
better with an ingenious measurement of the distance to the moon.
The
students analysed an mp3 recording of the conversation between Neil
Armstrong on the surface and ground control in Houston in which he
utters his famous “one small step” speech. The recording is available
on the NASA website.
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.
That’s not bad given that the actual distance varies between 3.63 and 4.05 x10^8 metres.
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