Moon Facts
One of the most awe-inspiring moon facts is that a very young earth had no moon at all. Astonishing! Isn’t it? Basically, the Moon was created when a rock of about Martian size slammed into our planet earth. Soon after this event, the solar system began to form, and all this happened about 4.5 billion years ago.
The moon is a natural satellite of the earth and the second brightest heavenly body, after the sun. The size of the moon is approximately one-fourth of the Earth’s size and its total surface measure is around 9.4 billion acres or 14658000 square miles.
There are many interesting moon facts. Luna 3 was the first space craft (built by Russians) to send some amazing pictures of the moon’s surface. Those pictures showed an extremely dry, airless surface with two primary types of terrain; one which was heavily cratered and the other relatively smooth. These craters are accountable for the dark spots that we see on the moon.
The then Soviet Union, were the first to visit the Moon in the year 1959, in the spacecraft called Luna 2. Man set his first foot on Moon on the July 20th, 1969 and the last instance was in December, 1972.
The moon is the only object from which rock samples have been brought back to the earth. Approximately about 383kg of rock samples was brought back to the earth by the Lunar and Apollo programs. These samples are the main source of detailed moon facts, which provide most of our understanding of the moon today. These samples are very precious to our scientists and are still being studied to extract more information.
The time the moon takes to complete one spin around its own axis is exactly the same, to the time taken by it to complete one orbit of the earth i.e. about 27.3 days. We can see only 58% of the moon’s surface from the earth. Actually only one side of the moon remains visible to us; the other side always remains hidden. The lunar dark side has been captured in photographs taken from spacecraft.
The view of the moon’s shape from the surface of the earth keeps on changing, in a repeated cycle. This change depends on the relative positions of the earth, sun and the moon. A full moon can be seen when the sun comes directly behind the earth and hence illuminates the full hemisphere of the moon. The new moon, which is the darkened moon can be seen when the moon comes directly between the sun and the earth.
The gravitational pull of the moon is 1/6th as in comparison to the earth, which means that a person weighing 60kg on earth will weigh only 10kg on the Moon. That sounds great doesn’t it?