About measuring the moon's radius?

Question

How's it done? Links to some sources explaining contemporary, advanced methods of measuring lunar radius will be much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

The diameter of the moon can be found out by measuring the angle subtended by its diameter at a particular point on the earth.The telescope is focussed on the disc image of the moon and the angle 'a' called angular diameter of the moon is measured. if 'd' is the diameter of the moon, and 'D' is the distance of the moon from the earth then, then ,d =aD, gives the diameter and dividng it by two, you get the radius of the moon.
This is the conventional method and I have no idea about any advanced method.

Answer 2

To do that we have to take into account the distance to the objects we are measuring. An example of that is that even though the Sun and the Moon have the same angular size, the Sun is in fact much larger than the Moon. They just appear the same size because the Sun is much farther. So from accurate measurements of the distance to the Sun and to the Moon, and measuring their angular sizes, we can get good estimates of their actual sizes. The values we get are that the radius of the Sun is 696,000 km, and the radius of the Moon is 1740 km

Answer 3

An object as large and close as the moon can be measured pretty accurately by triangulation alone. What's more it has been extensively mapped by radar