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Lunar Litter Used to Reveal Moon's Love Number

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 17, 2002 @07:28AM from the which-is-not-in-my-local-calling-area dept.

nickynicky9doors writes: "NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an article on the Moon's Love number. A planet's Love Number is a measure of ... 'how much a planet's surface and interior move in response to the gravitational pull of nearby bodies.' To measure the Moon's Love Number Laser pulses are directed off discarded retroreflectors leftover from missions thirty years ago."

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Excellent by CheshireCatCO · 2002-02-17 07:41 · Score: 3, Informative

It's very hard to get these parameters for planets and moons. Earth's is pretty well quantified and the Moon's was actually not bad before this (my Solar System Dynamics text has 0.03, which is close to the value in the article).

We also are reasonably confidence in the other planets' Love numbers. But we are just guessing on, say, Io and Europa. And those are cases where it'd be truely nice to know what the Love numbers are, since that helps determine the heating rates.