This is a repository for information about the Moon... The contents of this particular branch of SpaceWeb will be updated as warranted. If any individual, group, or company would like their experiments or astrological observations included herein, Please email the Webmaster concerning your content...
Diameter : 3476 km
Mass : 7.35e22 kg
Mean Distance from Earth : 384400 km
The moon is one of the brightest objects in the sky, second only to our sun, orbiting the earth in an elliptical orbit once a month. It varies in its distance from us between 356375 km at its closest and 406720 km at it furthest with an eccentricity of 5.5% It also is responsible for the tides we see in Earth's Oceans, because the gravitational forces between the Earth and Moon affect the liquid bodies on our planet much more so than its crust. This gravitational pull between the Earth and Moon while the Earth rotates, gives us usually two high tides per day...
The angle between the Sun, Earth, and Moon changes, and we see this as
the cycle of the moon's phases.The time between these cycles, or 'new' Moons is 29.5 days or 710 hours. This is slightly different from the orbital period of the moon measured against the stars, because the Earth moves quite a bit in its orbit around the Sun in that time...
The Moon, like Earth, has a rocky crust, Mantle (only partially molten) and a small core which is slightly off-center from it geometric center, in the direction of Earth. The crust varies in its thickness, but averages 68 km thick, and the thinnest facing the Earth. Something else is that the nearside is smoother and younger in
a geological sense. The nearside contains The Maria, or impact craters which were later flooded with lava, while the far side contains the older highlands. The surface is made up of regolith which is a combination of dust and debris, rocks and other formations left over from meteoroid impacts. The Moon has no atmosphere, or global magnetic field, and is thus exposed directly to solar winds. Over the 4 billion year lifespan of the moon, it's regolith has become peppered with Hydrogen ions, carried by the solar winds. Thhis may be a valuable resource that could be extracted and used to refuel spacecraft on the surface. Another valuable resource for any kind of long-duration stay on the moon's surface was discovered by the Clementine lunar probe, and confirmed by Lunar Prospector. Water Ice is hidden in large craters near the poles, which are permanently shaded, keeping the ice frozen. The moon has approximately 1/5 the gravity of Earth, and has 14 days of light, followed by the same of darkness. These are called the dayspan and nightspan respectively.
The moon was first visited by Soviet spacecraft in 1959, Luna 2 & 3 sent back the first photos of the moon's farside. The Apollo missions were responsible for the first of the lunar landings, the first one occuring July 20, 1969.It is the only other body in the Solar System to be visited by humans, and 380 kg of moon samples have been returned to the Earth for study, which have been dated at 3 to 4 and a half billion years old. Terrestrial rocks by comparison have mostly been dated the same, and the theory that an impact with the Earth by another large planetary body caused the moon to be formed from the ejected debris...
The Artemis Project is a non-government, privately-funded project to establish a small lunar settlement on the moon. It has been going for sometime now, and the project hopes that with its timeline and business plan, commercial travel to a lunar settlement would happen in the second decade of the new millenium. Their Web Site contains all the project's plans, spacecraft designs, and even a 3-d VR tour of the proposed lunar settlement. The site also explains everything about how the missions and spacecraft will be paid for, designed, and implemented! This is a super site, with a ton of information, and allows people to become members and contribute to a real space project! A definite MUST-visit if you are interested in space...
