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To: bigheadfred

No. There would be little bias if any for farsIde impacts. It just doesn’t work that way, orbital mechanics 101.


13 posted on 04/05/2014 8:36:08 AM PDT by John Valentine (Deep in the Heart of Texas)
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To: John Valentine; <1/1,000,000th%; bigheadfred; KoRn; raybbr

Thanks John Valentine and <1/1,000,000th%/, well explained.

The Moon is only about 2000 miles in diameter, and space debris is more likely to hit the 8000 mile diameter Earth. It can come from all directions. Impacts on the lunar surface have been observed a few times, I’ll scare up some links for the bottom of this post.

The difference between the two hemispheres of the Moon is analogous to the Martian surface, and as the fringe author Donald Patten suggested, the “Hemisphere of Craters” on Mars probably would look like the “Opposite Hemisphere”, vis a vis crater distribution, if it weren’t for a single large impact event sometime in the Martian past, during which a lot of craters formed more or less simultaneously.

The Moon probably had a very similar large impact event, or several, resulting in a resurfacing of the visible side, covering the original crater structure which looked a lot like the far side does now.

The tidal lock which the Moon now has with the Earth is due to the tidal transfer of momentum common to satellites; the Moon is about 1 percent the mass of the Earth, and while this tidal transfer is basically causing the distance between the Earth and Moon to increase over time, the energy for that comes out of a slow deceleration of the rotation on the axis.

Given enough time, the Earth could lose enough to be tidally locked with the Moon. The two globes might then show the same faces to each other from then on. Before that time the Moon will probably be pushed far enough away to leave the Earth’s sphere of influence and go on a field trip through the Solar System.

Thanks all.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1216757/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1313256/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/809572/posts
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3020759/posts

also related:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2186775/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1665706/posts


16 posted on 04/05/2014 9:27:49 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Obama is now making Jimmy Carter look like Attila the Hun. /focus/news/3138768/posts)
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