Image credit: NASA
Achieving legendary status in 1973, Pink Floyd’s album “
The Dark Side of the Moon” laid the foundation for a new musical era… and also laid the framework for a multi-generational misconception about Moon. Today, many people still assume that there really is a “dark side” to the Moon; however,
this is not the case.
Of course, you may have already noticed that the visible area of the Moon that on any given night is always identical. But this doesn’t mean that the Moon is at a standstill. It still rotates. In fact, Earth’s Moon has a Geosynchronous Orbit (GSO). In layman’s terms, this means that it will always have the same surface region visible to the Earth. This is a product of the gravitational forces that are at play between the Earth and the Moon.
The Moon makes the oceans and seas act like brakes on the Earth, slowing the planet down. Simultaneously, the Earth accelerates the Moon. This means that, currently (and for the foreseeable future), the Earth and the Moon are committed to the same rotational time. Later on, the end result is that this will ultimately turn into a form of geo-stationary orbit, where the Moon will only ever be over one region of Earth ALL the time. Don’t worry though, neither we nor our descendants will get to see this process. In fact, when it finally happens, the Sun will have already evaporated Earth’s oceans and consumed Mercury, Venus, and probably both the Earth and the Moon as it enters its Red Giant phase (in short, it’s going to be awhile).
So, does this mean that we can only ever see 50% of the Earth? Not quite.
Based on the way that it orbits and rotates, are actually able see 59% of the Moon’s surface. And recently, NASA released a video to allows us to get a glimpse of the far side. In the release, NASA asserts:
Just like the near side, the far side goes through a complete cycle of phases. But the terrain of the far side is quite different. It lacks the large dark spots, called maria, that make up the familiar Man in the Moon on the near side. Instead, craters of all sizes crowd together over the entire far side. The far side is also home to one of the largest and oldest impact features in the solar system, the South Pole-Aitken basin, visible here as a slightly darker bruise covering the bottom third of the disk.
The far side was first seen in a handful of grainy images returned by the Soviet Luna 3 probe, which swung around the Moon in October, 1959. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched fifty years later, and since then it has returned hundreds of terabytes of data, allowing LRO scientists to create extremely detailed and accurate maps of the far side. Those maps were used to create the imagery seen here.
So take a moment to get a glimpse of the other side...
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