I once read in a comic strip that NASA uses rockets to bring the moon to Earth. Is this possible?
Answer
There is no rocket powerful enough to do this. The reason is the gigantic mass of the moon compared to that of a rocket. A Space Shuttle has a final mass of about 20 tones, so 20000 kilograms when it enters orbit around the earth.
The moon has a mass of 7.4 1022 kilogram, so 3.7 billion billion times more. With a shiuttle you could see the moon a speed on the order of 10-15 m/s can give. After one year, the moon would have moved a few hundred thousandths of a millimeter.
NASA did, of course, bring moonSTONES to Earth during the Apollo project. I thought the former USSR was once able to bring a moon rock to Earth via an unmanned probe. Maybe they meant moon rocks in that comic.
Answered by
prof.dr. Paul Hellings
Department of Mathematics, Fac. IIW, KU Leuven
Old Market 13 3000 Leuven
https://www.kuleuven.be/
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