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
The way orbit work is that for a specific altitude you need a specific speed. So if you wanted to orbit at the ground level on earth you would need to travel at 17,000mph. At low earth orbit around 1,200 miles up you can go at around 14,000mph. At geostationary orbit which is around 22,000 miles up you can go at around 7,000mph. And when you reach the orbit of the moon which is around 220,000 miles up you can go at 2,288mph.
So as you can see it’s a long way to go during which the astronaut are slowly decelerating. The Apollo Rocket only go at 24,000 MPH to reach a stable orbit. After that it slowly go up, while decelerating to keep their orbit stable as they slowly get closer to the moon. It took about 4 days for the astronaut to reach the moon from the launch, so the amount of G force is not really high, since the deceleration is spread across so much time. By the time they reached the orbit of the moon the astronaut are going at the same speed as the moon, so they are nearly stationary compare to it, making it relatively easy to land.
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