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
OP, you are (presumably) on Earth, and our planet is spinning on its axis at about 1,000mph, and the spinning globe is zooming around the sun at 67,000 mph – so how are you able to safely walk around, sit down etc? If you take a flight, how can the aircraft possibly land on airfield that’s moving so fast?
The answer is that you are gravitationally coupled to the Earth, so as it spins, you move with it, so you don’t experience that spin at all. So is the atmosphere, so is that plane you flew in.
When the astronauts visited the moon, they crossed over the tipping point between Earth gravity dominating what happened to them into the domain where lunar gravity dominates, and the same effects that keep you seated at your monitor rather than thrown sideways into your wall at 460m/s due to the spin alone kicked in.
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