1st Video of Moon's Far Side

chill writes "A gravity-mapping spacecraft orbiting the moon has beamed home its first video of the lunar far side — a view people on Earth never see. Because the moon is tidally locked with Earth, it only presents one face to the planet's surface (the near side). The side of the moon that faces away from Earth is the far side. Only robotic spacecraft and Apollo astronauts who orbited the moon in the 1960s and 1970s have seen the far side of the moon directly."

Comments

Noob Question

[OopsIDied]

I always wondered, are the speeds of rotation of the moon and Earth so perfectly synced that even after a long time the same side of the moon is facing us? I'd think there might be at least a little speed difference that over the years would cause our view of the moon to shift.

Cool

[eternaldoctorwho]

There are a klot of joking posts here, but I think this really is a cool thing. Maybe I'm biased because I just finished reading Jules Verne's Around the Moon last night. We've certainly come a long way in understanding our nearest neighbor. In the book, it was hypothesized that the far side of the moon had retained an atmosphere and thus possibly supported life. Also, the craters were all thought to be volcanic in origin, but hey, Verne did a pretty good job all-in-all. Just about 100 years later, we did an actual moon fly-by similar to what he has described (only in Apollo's case, it was intentional). Modern day sci-fi writers can learn a thing or two from the greats of the past.

Re:Dark Side

[radtea]

Reason being that those were formed by lava flows on the surface, and you can imagine that if there's molten rock inside, it would be pulled (as expected) towards a big nearby gravity well - Earth in this case.

The difference in surface character on the two faces of the Moon are still a matter of considerable debate, and this particular just-so story--like so much that "just makes sense"--is completely false. References can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_mare

There was recent work published suggesting the difference in hemispheres could be due to a late, large, low-velocity impact event that happened shortly after the lunar formation impact on Earth.

The biggest single lesson from the past 300 years of scientific discovery is that if something "just makes sense" to brains whose evolution has been driven primarily by the social processes of mate competition and mate selection then it is probably wrong. An educated person when presented with an explanation that has intuitive appeal will treat it with well-deserved suspicion until they have seen it publicly tested by systematic observation or controlled experiment (that is, scientifically validated) and not glibly repeat it as if it were knowledge rather than speculation.