Optical Corner Reflectors
In optics, corner reflectors typically consist of three mirrors or reflective prism faces which return an incident light beam in the opposite direction. In surveying, retroreflector prisms are commonly used as targets for long-range electronic distance measurement using a total station.
NASA has put several optical corner reflectors made of quartz, known as the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment, on the Moon for use in laser time-of-flight measurement to measure the Moon’s orbit more precisely than was possible before.
Arrays of tiny corner reflectors are used in automobile and bicycle tail lights. Microscopic corner reflector structures can be incorporated into reflective paint for increased visibility at night, although retroreflective spherical beads are more common for this purpose.
Read more about this topic: Corner Reflector
Famous quotes containing the words optical and/or corner:
“The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)