27.4 day old moon
5.0 percent lit
Earth is the planet humans live on. Get used to the idea of marrying Earth and living with it rather than pretending this planet is a spouse you can take for granted without ill effects.
Please get over this stuff that science is inconvenient. Science is the reason we all made it this far.
I am not necessarily happy with what is transpiring in science at times, but, I always remain grateful for it. Take the lasers they are shooting between Earth and the moon. Like. Really? What is that doing to feed the hungry in the USA? Is it all that important for me to know the moon is moving a fingernail growth away from Earth every year? I do not like lasers, especially big ones that are in space.
August 10, 2020
Dozens of times over the last decade NASA scientists (click here) have launched laser beams at a reflector the size of a paperback novel about 240,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) away from Earth. They announced today, in collaboration with their French colleagues, that they received signal back for the first time, an encouraging result that could enhance laser experiments used to study the physics of the universe.
The reflector NASA scientists aimed for is mounted on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a spacecraft that has been studying the Moon from its orbit since 2009. One reason engineers placed the reflector on LRO was so it could serve as a pristine target to help test the reflecting power of panels left on the Moon’s surface about 50 years ago. These older reflectors are returning a weak signal, which is making it harder to use them for science.
Scientists have been using reflectors on the Moon since the Apollo era to learn more about our nearest neighbor. It’s a fairly straightforward experiment: Aim a beam of light at the reflector and clock the amount of time it takes for the light to come back. Decades of making this one measurement has led to major discoveries.
One of the biggest revelations is that the Earth and Moon are slowly drifting apart at the rate that fingernails grow, or 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) per year. This widening gap is the result of gravitational interactions between the two bodies...
