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[i]That spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, circles the moon once every two hours, and it has beamed home millions of high-resolution images of the lunar surface... In 2017, Dr. [Erwan] Mazarico, [a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center], and his collaborators began firing an infrared laser from a station near Grasse, France — about a half-hour drive from Cannes — toward the orbiter's retroreflector. At roughly 3 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2018, they [URL=https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40623-020-01243-w]recorded their first success[/URL]: a detection of 25 photons that made the round trip. The researchers notched three more successes by the fall of 2019. After accounting for the smaller size of the orbiter's retroreflector, Dr. Mazarico and his colleagues found that it often returned photons more efficiently than the Apollo retroreflectors. There isn't enough evidence yet to categorically blame the dust for the poorer performance of the moon's retroreflectors, said Dr. Mazarico, and more observations are being collected. But Dr. [Tom] Murphy, [a physicist at the University of California, San Diego] and other scientists said the new findings were helping build the case.[/i]
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