Dr Shane Bergin

four and a half billion years ago it was a lot closer it was 10 times closer to the earth than it is now and so it must have appeared absolutely massive in the sky and since then it has been inching quite literally away from us the earth is leaving or the moon or vice versa the moon is leaving the earth at the rate your fingernails grow so around four centimeters a little over an inch and a half a year it's slowly slowly moving away from us

It is.

Yeah, it's made exactly the same stuff.

And actually, when we went to the moon for the first time in the 1970s, a lot of the science that was done was to bring moon rock back.

And we discovered that it's made from more or less the same sort of stuff as the Earth.

We got some of that moon rock from Apollo 11 when Neil Armstrong et al.

went.

It was given to the Dunsink Observatory and was famously lost in a fire in the 1970s.

They didn't have it in a secure box.

Of course, when they went into the ruined room afterwards, they didn't know which was the moon rock.

So it's now in a dump in Finglas.

There is, yes.

We got a little bit later, got more, and thankfully we've minded that one.

So why do we go there?

Well, that's a big question, right?

As John F. Kennedy said, we go to the moon and do the other things, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

And it was hard from an engineering and a scientific point of view.

But also, I think, really, the main reason we went to the moon was politics, right?

Because it was a prized possession.

It was, if we can send rockets to the moon, then we can send rockets to your back garden.