Frank Sinatra crooned, “Fly me to the Moon / Let me play among the stars / Let me see what spring is like / On Jupiter and Mars.” He most likely wouldn’t have predicted at the time that it would eventually come to pass with Artemis III. It seems more possible than ever to observe the Moon blooming with spring. The exciting news of NASA’s Artemis III mission, which will attempt to cultivate plants on the moon and be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972, was recently released. The Moon, the sole natural satellite of Earth, circles the planet at an average distance of 384,400 km, or almost 30 times its diameter.
With New Observations Made Before The Artemis III Mission, More Information About Moon Is Being Found
Robert Massey states, “The consensus is that the Moon originated in a violent event between the proto-Earth, an early Earth that was significantly larger than it is today, and an object (labeled ‘Theia’) about the size of Mars.”
The study notes that “the Moon started about ten times closer to the Earth than it is now.” “Consider that the Moon is ten times larger when you look up at the night sky.” According to computer calculations, the Moon may have even been closer than it is now—between 12 and 19 times closer, at a distance of about 20,000–30,000 km as opposed to 384,000 km. It’s still whirling away, too.
