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
Speeds are relative. 24,000 mph doesn’t mean anything unless you specify what object or celestial body that speed is relative to. The same applies to 2,288 mph. That’s the moon’s speed around the Earth. Once the spacecraft entered lunar orbit, which it did by burning it’s engines to slow down, it was moving *with* the moon, the same way you and I and everything else on Earth is moving *with* the Earth as it orbits the sun at 67,000 miles per hour.
The Apollo spacecraft orbited the moon at roughly 3,600 miles per hour, which is far slower than an equivalent orbit around the Earth. The lunar module just had to burn its engines to lose that 3,600 mph so it could land on the surface with no horizontal and low vertical velocity. G forces come from acceleration, not speed, and the lunar module engines didn’t provide enough acceleration for the astronauts to feel more than 1/3g – 1/2g.
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