Tuesday, May 22. 2007

Quote of the Day: "My job was to install the mirror" - Neil Armstrong

Former astronaut and the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, was the keynote speaker of Intergraph 2007, the company's user conference. Armstrong recounted one of the reasons for going to the moon, which was to install a mirror in the Sea of Tranquility that would reflect a beam of light from Mt. Hamilton, near San Jose, California to more accurately measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon. "My job was to install the mirror," joked Armstrong in a humorous but humble statement illustrating his part in reaching one of man's greatest achievements.

The Lick Observatory hosted the instrument that beamed the light to the moon and is still operational today. Armstrong likened the experiment to trying to hit a coin with a rifle from a distance of two miles. He also said that initially the experiment failed until it was determined that the Observatory had incorrectly calculated its own lat/long in order to receive the reflected beam from the Moon.

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