The explanations of the moon rotating while always keeping one side facing earth are still perplexing to me, but I hadn’t thought about how fast it’s actually orbiting us. I know the Apollo rockets traveled 24,000 MPH, but how were the astronauts able to safely land the lunar module on a body moving so fast? The lunar module wouldn’t have been able to slowly descend to the surface, it would have to race to catch it. There’s no air resistance to make astronauts or moon dust fly off, but wouldn’t there still be an insane amount of g-force at such high speeds?
In: Physics
Imagine two sky divers jump out of a plane 5 seconds apart from each other. The first skydiver spreads their arms out, and is falling at 120 MPH. The second skydiver points his head down and is falling at 150 MPH. So relative to the first skydiver he’s now approaching at 30 mph. He can catch up, slow down by spreading his arms out, and the two can now match their speeds and shake hands and play catch mid air. They’re both falling at 120MPH relative to the earth, but relative to each other they’re essentially not moving.
This is kind of how a spacecraft speeds up, catches up to a celestial body, and then lands on it safely. The first skydiver is the moon, the second is the space shuttle, and only the relative difference in speed between them has to be compensated for in order to land safely.
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