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You may not believe a gun can be shot on the moon. Up until now, if you wanted to test some theories about the Moon, its distance, or deviations from general relativity, you would have to shoot a laser from Earth to a group of old, dusty and imprecise reflectors from the Apollo era, which sit on the surface the big cheese, but that might all be changing. NASA announced recently that it's funding development of a moon-based laser system, which would answer the laser bursts from Earth with its own, thus cutting down on fluctuations in readings and allowing for a more accurate study of the Moon's distance. Because there's no better way to spend several million dollars than sending a laser up to the moon to clarify a few millimeters of uncertainty.

Called a laser transponder, the device would detect an incoming laser pulse from Earth and then fire its own laser back in response. The resulting signal would be much stronger and could therefore be detected by dozens of different observatories around the world. This in turn would allow for more accurate measurements of the Moon's distance. They also plan to develop new reflectors that would allow the three observatories that can currently detect the weak signals to achieve accuracies of about 1 millimeter in their distance measurements.

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