The Moon's Recent Missions:
• Chang'e 3 (2013)
CNSA (China) Lunar Lander and Rover
• LADEE (2013)
NASA lunar orbiter dust environment mission
• GRAIL (2011)
NASA lunar orbiter mission
• Chang'e 2 (2010)
CNSA lunar orbiter mission
• ARTEMIS-P1 and ARTEMIS-P2 (2010)
NASA Heliophysics/Lunar Orbiter Mission
• Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (2009)
NASA Lunar Orbiter Mission
• LCROSS (2009)
NASA Lunar Impactor Mission
Profile:
Circumference at Equator: 10,917.0 km
Diameter: 3,475 km
Mass: 73,476,730,924,573,500 million kg (0.0123 x Earth)
Orbits: The Earth
Average Distance from Earth: 384,400 km
Length of Orbit: 27.3 Earth days
Surface Temperature: -233 to 123 °C
10 Need-to-Know Things About The Moon:
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If the sun were as tall as a typical front door, Earth would be the size of a nickel and the moon would the size of a green pea.
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The moon is Earth's satellite and orbits the Earth at a distance of about 384 thousand km (239 thousand miles) or 0.00257 AU.
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The moon makes a complete orbit around Earth in 27 Earth days and rotates or spins at that same rate, or in that same amount of time. This causes the moon to keep the same side or face towards Earth during the course of its orbit.
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The moon is a rocky, solid-surface body, with much of its surface cratered and pitted from impacts.
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The moon has a very thin and tenuous (weak) atmosphere, called an exosphere.
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The moon has no moons.
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The moon has no rings.
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More than 100 spacecraft have been launched to explore the moon. It is the only celestial body beyond Earth that has been visited by human beings (The Apollo Program).
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The moon's weak atmosphere and its lack of liquid water cannot support life as we know it.
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Surface features that create the face known as the "Man in the moon" are impact basins on the moon that are filled with dark basalt rocks.
The Moon Landing
The moon was first visited by the U.S.S.R.'s Luna 1 and Luna 2 in 1959, and a number of U.S. and U.S.S.R. robotic spacecraft followed. The first human landing on the moon was on 20 July 1969. During the 1969-1972 Apollo missions, 12 American astronauts walked on the moon and used a Lunar Roving Vehicle to travel on the surface and extend their studies of soil mechanics, meteoroids, lunar ranging, magnetic fields, and solar wind.
Buzz Aldrin stands beside a lunar seismometer, looking back toward the lunar landing module. Image Credit & Copyright: Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 Crew, GRIN, NASA
How did the moon form?
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There are various theories about how the moon was created, but recent evidence indicates it formed when a huge collision tore a chunk of Earth away.
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The leading explanation for how the moon formed was that a giant impact knocked off the raw ingredients for the moon off the primitive molten Earth and into orbit. Scientists have suggested the impactor was roughly 10 percent the mass of Earth, about the size of Mars. Because Earth and the moon are so similar in composition, researchers have concluded that the impact must have occurred about 95 million years after the formation ofthe solar system, give or take 32 million years. (The solar system is roughly 4.6 billion years old.)
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Although the large impact theory dominates the scientific community’s discussion, another theory suggests that two young moons couldhave collided to form a single large one. Earth may even have stolen the moon from Venus, according to a recent theory.
More Information:
Earth's Moon:
The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It The rhythm of the moon's phases has guided humanity for millennia — for instance, calendar months are roughly equal to the time it takes to go from one full moon to the next.
