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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Our nearest celestial neighbour, the Moon, is associated with romance, madness, adventure, scientific ambition, high politics and conspiracy on the back of humanity's recent return to lunar orbit. We thought we'd take a closer look. I'm joined by physicist Dr Shane Bergen, Associate Professor at UCD. Now, we didn't actually send you to the Moon, but we did send you to find out all about the Moon.
Why are we so fascinated with the Moon?
I'm so glad you didn't send me to the Moon. I'd be the worst physicist to go to the Moon, yeah. Are we there yet? Yeah. The thing about the moon that fascinates us is that it is so near to us in the grand scheme of things, yet it's so far. It's so familiar, yet so alien. You know, it is an ancient timekeeper, a constant.
Your recent slot there about the beginning of May, we associate times of the year with it, like the flower moon that might come around Bealtaine. It has been going around the Earth as long as the Earth has been here. But yet it has all these strange qualities. It's a place of complete extremes.
A day on the moon, in other words, the time for it to orbit on its own axis, is the same amount of time as it takes for it to go around the Earth. So one of our months is equivalent to a lunar day. And as a consequence of that, we always face the same side of the moon. So we only ever see you the one face.
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Chapter 2: Why are we so fascinated with the Moon?
And everyone refers to the other side as Pink Floyd rightly said, the dark side of the moon. Really? I'm not sure it would have sold as many copies. It should have been the far side of the moon like Gary Larson. So it gets light on the backside of the moon. It's just that it is dark to us. We cannot see it. It's a place of temperature extreme.
It can range in the sun from 130 Celsius all the way down to a chilly minus 150 in the lunar night. No life, thin atmosphere, completely barren. Because it has no atmosphere, it's pocketed with craters from meteorites and various space debris having hit it for billions of years. Do we know where it came from? We do. Oh, good. Well, sort of. It's kind of been a scientific mystery for a long time.
The Earth is four and a half billion years old. And not long after the Earth was formed in the early solar system, a giant Mars-sized object crashed into the Earth. And it was the mother of all sort of collisions. And from it, a lot of things happened. Firstly, the Earth was knocked on its side. It was tilted, which gave us the seasons. And also it made the Earth rotate faster.
So a day on the Earth then was only five hours long. As a consequence of that collision, a lot of debris was sent into orbit and it was reconstituted as the moon. And so the moon has been there going around us since then. Of course,
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
Okay. And it's made of the same stuff as Earth, isn't it?
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.
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Chapter 3: What are the unique characteristics of the Moon?
Oh, OK. But there is a bit in the National Museum.
There is, yes. We got a little bit later, got more, and thankfully we've minded that one.
OK, so you've explained how inhospitable the moon is. You've explained that it's made of the same stuff, more or less, as Earth.
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. And so it was a sign of strength. But a lot of good science and engineering got done along the way. It cost at one point 4.5% of America's GDP. Which is absolutely incredible. The biggest superpower in the world at the time and still putting all of that money and energy into getting there.
And there were a lot of unexpected consequences from that mission to the moon of the 70s, not least the beginning of the modern environmental movement. So when we were so keen on getting to the moon, I think there was very little focus on looking back at where we'd come from.
And there was that famous Christmas Eve photograph of the Earth rising over the lunar horizon, so-called Earthrise photograph that was taken in 1968 and a flyby. And it was said that that was the beginning of us looking at this kind of spaceship Earth, this fragile blue dot in the vast expanse of space and realising, gosh, for all our money, all our weapons, all our power,
We're very fragile and we need to look after ourselves.
So we went to the moon several times and then we stopped.
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Chapter 4: How did the Moon originate?
Pleasure to talk to you as always.