Bulan ( Pengetahuan Am )

VITAL STATISTICS

Distance from the Earth: 384,400 km (center to center)
Diameter: 2160 miles = 3476 km
Mass: 73,480,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg
Temperature: -292 F to 266 F
Any rings? No
Synodic period (from new moon to new moon): 29.531 days

WHAT'S IT MADE OF?

Scientists think that the moon has a small iron rich core that used to be molten (hot liquidy stuff), but is now solid. This is surrounded by a layer of iron rich rocks that we call the plastic asthenosphere. (Plastic here just means non-rigid.) Then there is the lithosphere which is just more rocks - only less dense (less stuff there.) Finally, on the surface is the crust. The cool thing is that we've actually BEEN to the moon and brought home a bunch of moon rocks and moon dirt from this crust!

CAN I LIVE THERE?

No. There's nothing to breathe - not even poisonous stuff and there's no water to drink. There is some ice though, but it would be really hard to get to. (We'll talk about that under "Other Cool Stuff.") Also, the moon is way too hot in the daytime and way too cold at night. One of the reasons for this is that the days and nights are both really long. This gives the moon lots of time to heat up during the day and lots of time to get cold at night. However, the moon would be a VERY good place for a space station! Maybe you'll be the one to figure out how to get to the ice and make it nice drinking water!

HOW FAST WOULD A ROCKET HAVE TO GO TO GET OFF THIS THING?

To escape the Moon's gravity and get out into space, a rocket has to travel at a speed of 5,400 mph or 2.4 km/sec. That's only about 83 times faster than your parents are allowed to drive on a highway!

OTHER COOL INFO

As the moon travels around the Earth, it rotates very slowly... In fact, it rotates at just the perfect speed so that it keeps the same side pointed towards the Earth at all times! So, when you look up at the moon, no matter when you look, you'll always seen the same face.

Our tides (high tide and low tide) are partially caused by the moon's gravity pulling on the Earth. (The Sun helps a little with the tides too.)

It would take 50 moons to fit inside the Earth!

Twelve astronauts have gotten to walk on the moon! Neil Armstrong was the first. These moon missions happened between July 1969 and December 1972 and we haven't sent anybody up there since.

The moon has no magnetic field (it's not a magnet) and nothing much has changed on it's surface for about 3 billion years. There are big dark areas on the moon (that you can see if you look up) that are called maria (not like the name - it's pronounced MAR-ee-uh). Maria is latin for sea, since they look like big dark oceans. But, they are really huge old lava flows.

Most people don't know this, but there are big lakes of frozen ice on the moon! Yes, that means water!! In 1994 and again in 1998 we had an unmanned space craft fly by the moon and they found evidence that there are lakes in ice in the very bottom of some really deep basins (kind of like a canyon.) They think that comets may have crashed into the basins a long time ago and just didn't melt. Since sun light can never reach the bottom of these basins, the temperature down there could be as low as -369 F... This is as cold as Pluto!! There may be as much as 300,000,000 tons (600,000,000,000 pounds) of ice up there.