Estimating the Speed of Light from Earth-Moon Communication

David Keeports

Citation: The Physics Teacher 44, 414 (2006); doi: 10.1119/1.2353576

View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.2353576
View Table of Contents: http://aapt.scitation.org/toc/pte/44/7
Published by the American Association of Physics Teachers

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Estimating the Speed of
Light from Earth-Moon
Communication
David Keeports, Mills College, Oakland, CA

D
uring the Moon landing of Apollo 16 on Tony England in Houston saying the words “pretty
April 21, 1972, a spoken message from Earth outstanding picture.” Listen carefully, and you will
is heard returning to Earth roughly 2.7 s hear these words faintly yet clearly a few seconds later.
later. The signal traveled from Earth to the Moon, Measure the time between the original words and the
from the earphone to the microphone of astronaut echo about 10 times using a stopwatch (I suggest that
John Young’s space helmet, and back to Earth. A you focus your attention on one particular syllable)
recording of this “space echo,” available at Ref. 1, and average your recorded delays. According to the
enables a simple approximate determination of the program Starry Night™,3 the Moon’s surface was 3.830
speed of light. x 108 m from Earth’s surface at the time of this
Recently I published an article in this journal de- 1:20 p.m. broadcast. Divide twice this distance by
scribing a speed of light determination based upon your measured delay, and you will obtain a speed of
an echo from a communication satellite that I heard light value on the order of 3 x 108 m/s.
by chance while making an international phone call.2 With music composition software it is possible to
Using PASCO’s Data Studio software with a Science locate a point in an audio file to the nearest milli-
Workshop 750 Interface and a sound sensor, I was second. Figure 1 shows how I used Apple’s Logic Ex-
able to measure the time of the delay to the nearest press4 to locate the beginning of the word “picture”
millisecond. Furthermore, Kepler’s third law fixes the
distance of a geosynchronous communication satellite
above the equator. However, without knowing the lon-
gitude of the satellite and the ground delays during the
transmission of the signal, I was able to obtain only a
lower limit of about 0.8c for the speed of light.
Echoes similar to the one I observed were common
during Earth-Moon communications with Apollo as-
tronauts. Sound transmission through astronauts’ hel-
mets frequently returned radio signals originating on
Earth back to Earth. Since the variation of the Earth-
Moon distance with time is well-known, NASA Earth-
Moon communications enable estimates of c more ac-
curate than estimates based upon telephone echoes.
You can download a six-second audio clip from Ref.
Fig. 1. Audio file showing the beginning of the word
1. You will hear the voice of capsule communicator “picture” and the beginning of the word’s echo.

414 DOI: 10.1119/1.2353576 THE PHYSICS TEACHER ◆ Vol. 44, October 2006
both times it is heard on the recording and thus to
determine a delay of 5.158 s – 2.442 s = 2.716 s. You
can download the audio file and make a similar delay
measurement using Apple’s GargageBand.5 Just cre-
ate a “real instrument” track, drag the audio file to the
track, set the counter to display time, and examine the
file with the track editor.
Since only 2.555 s was required for the radio signal
to travel from Earth to the Moon to Earth, my mea-
sured delay appears to include 0.161 s of additional
transmission delays. However, the unreliability in
timing associated with the use of the magnetic tape
upon which the conversation was originally recorded
introduces some uncertainty in the difference between
the expected delay and my measured delay.

Acknowledgments
I thank Karl Mamola for suggesting the use of
NASA recordings for the estimation of c. I addition-
ally thank Steve Garber at NASA for putting me in
contact with Eric Jones at NASA. Eric both located
the recording now on the AIP file server and pro-
vided me with essential details about the Apollo 16
mission.

References
1. See EPAPS Document No. E-PHTEAH-44-009607
(http://ftp.aip.org/cgi-bin/epaps?ID=E-PHTEAH-44-
009607). For more information on EPAPS, see http://
www.aip.org/pubservs/epaps.html.
2. David Keeports, “Estimating the speed of light from a
satellite echo,” Phys. Teach. 42, 154–55 (March 2004).
3. Starry Night™ space and astronomy software is avail-
able at http://www.starrynight.com.
4. Logic Express is available through Apple at http://www.
apple.com/logicexpress.
5. GarageBand is included with all Apple computers. See
http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband.
PACS codes: 01.50.My, 01.55.+b, 06.20.Jr

David Keeports is a professor at Mills College, where he

has taught physics and physical chemistry for more than
20 years. He is a frequent contributor to TPT and a mem-
ber of TPT’s Editorial Board.
Department of Chemistry and Physics, Mills College,
Oakland, CA 94613; dave@mills.edu

THE PHYSICS TEACHER ◆ Vol. 44, October 2006 415