Which is pretty crazy when you think about it, hitting a target about 1.3 lightseconds away. As in, if you could sight it, you’d be looking at where it was 1.3 seconds ago. Because it is moving at about 1km/s relative to us. And don’t read that as km/h, that’s one kilometer every second, so by the time you see it, it’s already about 1.3km from where you see it, so you need to lead it by about 2.6km to hit it but aim your sensor at the apparent image.
Though it’s so far away that it doesn’t look that hard and the angle of difference between where you aim the laser and where you pick up the return signal is less than 0.00001 degree (thus you can solve that problem by ignoring it but still, just hitting that tiny distant moving target at all is impressive).
Which is pretty crazy when you think about it, hitting a target about 1.3 lightseconds away. As in, if you could sight it, you’d be looking at where it was 1.3 seconds ago. Because it is moving at about 1km/s relative to us. And don’t read that as km/h, that’s one kilometer every second, so by the time you see it, it’s already about 1.3km from where you see it, so you need to lead it by about 2.6km to hit it but aim your sensor at the apparent image.
Though it’s so far away that it doesn’t look that hard and the angle of difference between where you aim the laser and where you pick up the return signal is less than 0.00001 degree (thus you can solve that problem by ignoring it but still, just hitting that tiny distant moving target at all is impressive).