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P_I
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OK, so the moon has a rather large mass (I found somewhere a comparison with Earth which gave a value of about 75 billion trillion Kg/M3), but the spacecraft s Ebb and Flow are traveling rather fast with quite a lot of momentum(132KG each, 6050km/s = around 800000Kg m/s). So what sort of things might happen when Ebb and Flow hit the Moon?
I'm fairly sure that someone at NASA has already worked this out, but While my confidence in natural laws is high, my confidence in human beings is not as complete and it occurs to me that what NASA thinks will happen might be a little different to what does happen.
While I'm sure any miscalculations or oversights will be very small, what are the implications of such an impact going wrong? could debris from the impact return to earth? if it does will it be spectacular, or terrifying? could the moon be rotated enough that we could see new areas with a telescope, or might it even begin to have a rotation like the Earth's?
I can imagine a whole host of possibilities, but I'm afraid my astrophysics is very limited and am curious as to what more learned minds might postulate.
I'm fairly sure that someone at NASA has already worked this out, but While my confidence in natural laws is high, my confidence in human beings is not as complete and it occurs to me that what NASA thinks will happen might be a little different to what does happen.
While I'm sure any miscalculations or oversights will be very small, what are the implications of such an impact going wrong? could debris from the impact return to earth? if it does will it be spectacular, or terrifying? could the moon be rotated enough that we could see new areas with a telescope, or might it even begin to have a rotation like the Earth's?
I can imagine a whole host of possibilities, but I'm afraid my astrophysics is very limited and am curious as to what more learned minds might postulate.