Development of a 170-mm hollow corner cube retroreflector for the future lunar laser ranging**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11655001 and 11605065).

Abstract

Over the past 50 years, lunar laser ranging has made great contributions to the understanding of the Earth–Moon system and the tests of general relativity. However, because of the lunar libration, the Apollo and Lunokhod corner-cube retroreflector (CCR) arrays placed on the Moon currently limit the ranging precision to a few centimeters for a single photon received. Therefore, it is necessary to deploy a new retroreflector with a single and large aperture to improve the ranging precision by at least one order of magnitude. Here we present a hollow retroreflector with a 170-mm aperture fabricated using hydroxide-catalysis bonding technology. The precisions of the two dihedral angles are achieved by the mirror processing with a sub-arc-second precision perpendicularity, and the remaining one is adjusted utilizing an auxiliary optical configuration including two autocollimators. The achieved precisions of the three dihedral angles are 0.10 arc-second, 0.30 arc-second, and 0.24 arc-second, indicating the 68.5% return signal intensity of ideal Apollo 11/14 based on the far field diffraction pattern simulation. We anticipate that this hollow CCR can be applied in the new generation of lunar laser ranging.