xkcd #2908: Moon Armor Index
xkcd #2908: Moon Armor Index
Alt text:
Astronomers are a little unsure of the applicability of this index, but NASA's Planetary Protection Officer is all in favor.
One of my all-time favourite facts is that solar eclipses are actually a very rare thing to happen in space. There is no reason why but our moon just happens to be the right size/distance to have this happen.
I've never seen one in person, but the next one is on the 8th of April crossing Mexico and the US. If you have the chance and are able, go check it out, if only to gloat on an internet stranger longing for his first total eclipse.
Saw one when I was 9 like 20 years ago. Still one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Definitely worth a trip if you can.
One passed over my area while I was at university, and the professor whose class we were meant to be in just said the day beforehand that he wasn't even going to bother scheduling anything for the first hour because he didn't expect anyone to be in. There's a famous hill-top cemetery in the city, and sure enough I saw basically all of my classmates there too
I'm gonna be dead center for it here in Ohio, so excited. Got my welding helmet ready to watch it and the day off.
Putting on our moon armour could solve a lot of problems. It's not my most favourite solution though.
PS: Gonggong?!
Edit: dwarf planet. Discovered in 2007 and named after a god in the chinese mythology:Gonggong was ashamed that he lost the fight with Zhurong, the Chinese god of fire, to claim the throne of Heaven. In a fit of rage, he smashed his head against Buzhou Mountain, one of eight pillars holding up the sky, greatly damaging it and causing the sky to tilt towards the northwest and the Earth to shift to the southeast, which caused great floods and suffering.
🤷♀️
Sounds like someone who didn't learn healthy coping mechanisms.
Ah, it is Chinese, interesting. I'm guessing it's not the gonggong in 公共汽车, because that's a bus.
What, it almost literally is. It's 共工, like "work together"... but not like, go to work together (on the bus).
These characters have multiple entirely different meanings. How does one find out what the supposed meaning is? Or is it up to the reader to decide?
The old guy from everything everywhere all at once
Not bad, Jupiter. Considering you have 120x the surface area of earth, that's a lot of moons.
See Marco Inaros was just trying to give those inners some extra planet armor.
Is our moon really that big? I thought Charon-Pluto is kinda a special cases that they look like twin planets instead
It's the largest relative moon (fifth largest in absolute terms) of any planet (sorry Pluto) and is more than a quarter as large as the earth itself. It's also relatively further from the planet than most moons in the solar system.
Fun fact, you can actually fit every single other planet at the same time in the space between the earth and the moon, with a bit to spare.
Fun fact, you can actually fit every single other planet at the same time in the space between the earth and the moon, with a bit to spare.
Though, not for very long. Gravity hates when you try things like this.
Yeah, if you see a real scale moon + earth distance, you wonder why he doesn't just fly away.
I think part of it is that Mt Everest is a lot smaller than you'd think when you're looking at this scale. The moon is only 2% of the Earths volume so when you spread it over the Earths surface it's really like a thin thin film to cover the whole surface. But the truth is that all of human experience is an even thinner film smeared across the surface.
That's exactly what I was thinking, how is it possible?
Salacia sounds like what they’d call Risa in the porn version of Star Trek
I mean this does have a practical application, I think. The relative masses of moons to planets does imply the moons ability to sweep junk out of the way before it hits the planet.
This is not based on mass but on volume. For example the moon is only 1% of the earth's mass yet considerably less dense therefore it makes a thicker layer.
*imply
Sure. By even the density/mechanical properites of armor will affect its usefulness. Beyond simple thickness.
That's why we live here; the moon protects us!
Finally, Earth is Number One again (well Number Two if you count Pluto, that is)
That was why we told pluto it couldn't be in the club anymore.
Pluto-charon shouldn't count since it is more akin to a binary planetary system than a planet-moon system. Charon and Pluto are so close in size that the system has a barycenter outside of Pluto. This means instead of Charon orbiting a point inside Pluto, Charon and Pluto orbit a point about 800 km above Pluto's surface.
Mercury in shambles
Earth and moon, rejoined again at last!