Question: where can you shine a laser from to hit the moon

Stuart Archer answered on 18 Jun 2013:

The simple answer to this is that you could hit the Moon from anywhere you can see it! NASA actually has mirrors on the surface of the Moon to bounce laser light back to Earth so they can accurately measure how far away it is.

Let’s take it a bit further… Laser light usually travels in a straight line away from it’s source. However, it’s well know to astronomers that the path of light can be bent when it passes near to something with a lot of gravity, like a really big star or a black hole (this is actually one way they search for black holes). So, in theory, you could fire a laser that’s not pointed at the Moon and use something really heavy to bend the light to hit it. I don’t know why you’d need to do this, but it’s cool that you could! (Maybe you could come up with some ideas?! 🙂 )