The Moon and Its Core


Dr. Renee Weber, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, will participate in a live video webcast on Feb. 16 at 7 p.m. CST. Weber will discuss new research which definitively identified details about the moon’s core, as announced in a January issue of SCIENCE magazine.



Details about the findings from Dr. Weber’s team can be found at these two links:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6015/309
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2011/H-11-004.html


Click the link below to sign up to participate in a live video webcast (and submit questions in advance):

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/mymoon/


Snooping on the Neighbor


The moon is Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. It’s the brightest object in the night sky and has profoundly influenced the course of human civilization. For early humans, the moon provided lighting for hunting and defined when crops should be planted and harvested. Markings of lunar phases appear in cave paintings in France and defined the arrangement of Stonehenge.


A few facts about our neighbor:

  • At the moon’s closest distance, it would take 135 days to drive there in a car going 70 mph.
  • The moon has almost the same surface areas as the continent of Africa.
  • Our moon is inching away from Earth at a rate of 1.5 inches per year. (Was it something we said?)
  • The lunar maria or “seas” were formed by ancient lunar volcanic activity.
  • Because there’s no air on the moon, sound can’t travel above the surface — so if a tree fell on the moon, it wouldn’t make a peep. How the tree got there would be another story…

Hello, Neighbor!


Hello! Thanks for visiting our moon missions blog. We’re expanding the blog focus from two moon missions to relating information about the moon as “Our Nearest Neighbor.” New posts will focus on observations of the moon, ongoing studies of Apollo era data, flybys and investigations  from Discovery and Lunar Quest Missions — these observations and missions continue contributing to our knowledge base — in this space we will share what we persist to uncover about “our nearest neighbor.”


Apollo 8 image of the moon. (NASA)

Stay tuned as we continue to challenge the human spirit through exploration and discovery. Meanwhile, learn about some exciting and recent revelations about the moon’s Earth-like core: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/lunar_core.html