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The first chairman of NASA's Lunar Exploration Committee, Robert Jastrow, said that "the moon is the Rosetta stone of the planets." Let's hope it allows us to decipher as much of our human history as the Rosetta stone did for Egyptology. And so far, it certainly seem that it can.
I urge you to set aside all you ever thought you knew about this planetary satellite and allow yourself to imagine the most bizarre set of possibilities. As I scratch for historic and new information about the moon, I keep discovering such incredible new material that it forces me to reconsider all I thought I knew. There is certainly a lot more to the moon than meets the eye on the first, second and third inspection. So before we carry on with the story of the Astronauts and their experiences on the moon here are some fascinating facts about the moon – just to shake things up a little.
This information was compiled by Ronald Regehr; a researcher and scientist in the defence industry and NASA. His main attribute seems to be that he is an out-of-the-box thinker. I extracted and edited some of the more juicy bits of info to tickle your fancy.
1. Moon's Age: Is much older than previously expected and maybe even older than the Earth or even the Sun. Earth's age is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old at the most by some scientists – while various moon rocks were dated at 5.3 billion years old. What's more puzzling is that the dust upon which they were resting was at least another billion years older.
2. Rock's Origin: The chemical composition of the dust below the rocks differs remarkably from the rocks themselves. This excludes the possibility that the dust resulted from the weathering rocks themselves. Where did the rocks come from? Somewhere else?
3. Heavier Elements on Surface: On Earth and the composition of other planets, the heavier elements are normally found in the core while the lighter materials are concentrated at the surface. But not so with the moon. The abundance of refractory elements like titanium in the surface areas is so pronounced, that several geologists proposed that the refractory compounds must have been brought to the moon's surface in great quantity in some unknown way. They are adamant. They don't know how, but there is no other way for this to have happened!
4. Water Vapour: On the 7th March 1971, lunar instruments that were positioned on the moon by the astronauts recorded a cloud of water vapour passing across the surface of the moon. The cloud covered an area of about 100 square miles and lasted 14 hours.
5. Magnetic Rocks: Moon rocks are magnetised. This is very strange because there is no magnetic field on the moon itself. And it could not have originated from a "lose call" with Earth because such an encounter would have ripped the moon apart.
6. No Volcanoes: Some of the moon's craters originated internally, yet there is no indication that the moon was ever hot enough to produce volcanic eruptions.
7. Moon Mascons: Mascons are large, dense, circular masses, lying twenty to forty miles beneath the centres of each of the moon's large maria (dried crater-like ocean beds). Some scientists suggest that these are broad, disk-shaped objects, that could even be some kind of artificial constructions. Huge circular disks would not appear perfectly centred beneath each huge mare by coincidence or accident, they claim.
8. Seismic Activity: Hundreds of "moonquakes" are recorded each year that cannot be attributed to meteor strikes. In November 1958, Soviet astronomer Nikolay A. Kozyrev of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory photographed a gaseous eruption of the moon near the crater Alphonsus. He also detected a reddish glow that lasted for about an hour. In 1963, astronomers at the Lowell Observatory also saw reddish glows on the crests of ridges in the Aristarchus region.
What is really fascinating about these events, is that they were observed to be identical in their activity and they occur precisely and periodically, repeating themselves as the moon moves closer to Earth. These are probably not natural phenomena.
9. Hollow Moon: The moon's mean density is 3.34 gm/cm3 (3.34 times an equal volume of water) whereas the Earth's mean density is 5.5. What does this mean? In 1962, NASA scientist Dr. Gordon MacDonald stated, "If the astronomical data are reduced, it is found that the data require that the interior of the moon is more like a hollow than a homogeneous sphere."
Nobel chemist Dr. Harold Urey suggested the moon's reduced density is because of large areas inside the moon where is "simply a cavity."
MIT's Dr. Sean C. Solomon wrote, "the Lunar Orbiter experiments vastly improved our knowledge of the moon's gravitational field… indicating the frightening possibility that the moon might be hollow."
In Carl Sagan's work Intelligent Life in the Universe, the famous astronomer stated, "A natural satellite cannot be a hollow object."
10. Moon Echoes: On the 20th November 1969, the crew of Apollo 12 jettisoned the lunar module ascent stage causing it to crash onto the moon some 40 miles from the Apollo 12 landing site. This created an artificial moonquake with startling characteristics. The moon reverberated like a bell for more than an hour. This phenomenon was intentionally repeated with Apollo 13, when they allowed the third stage to impact the moon. The results were even more startling. Seismic instruments recorded that the reverberations lasted for three hours and twenty minutes and travelled to a depth of twenty-five miles. This lead to the conclusion that the moon has an unusually light, or even no core.
11. Unusual Metals: The moon's crust is much harder than presumed. The astronauts encountered extreme difficulty when they tried to drill into the maria. The maria is composed primarily ilmenite, which is a mineral containing large amounts of titanium, the same metal used to fabricate the hulls of deep-diving submarines and the skin of the SR-71 "Blackbird". What is even more puzzling, was the discovery of Uranium 236 and Neptunium 237 in lunar rocks (elements not found in nature on Earth). And a further surprise was finding rustproof iron particles. What?
12. Moon's Origin: Before the moon rocks conclusively disproved all the common theories about the moon's origins, these were some of the theories.
The moon was believed to have originated when a chunk of Earth broke off eons ago (who knows from where, if the materials are not the same?).
Another theory was that the moon was created from leftover "space dust" remaining after the Earth was created. Analysis of the composition of moon rocks disproved this theory also.
Another popular theory is that the moon was somehow "captured" by the Earth's gravitational attraction. But no scientific evidence exists to support this theory. Isaac Asimov stated, "It's too big to have been captured by the Earth. The chances of such a capture having been effected and the moon then having taken up a nearly circular orbit around our Earth, are too small to make such an eventuality credible."
13. Weird Orbit: Our moon does not rotate on its axis. We only ever see one side of the moon. There is what is known as the "dark side of the moon" that we have never seen from Earth. It is the only moon in the solar system that has a stationary, near-perfect circular orbit. Stranger still, the moon's centre of mass is about 6000 feet closer to the Earth than its geometric centre (which should cause wobbling), but the moon's bulge is on the far side of the moon, away from the Earth. "Something or someone" had to put the moon in orbit with its precise altitude, course, and speed.
14. Moon Diameter: How does one explain the "coincidence" that the moon is just the right distance, coupled with just the right diameter, to completely cover the sun during an eclipse? Again, Isaac Asimov responds, "There is no astronomical reason why the moon and the sun should fit so well. It is the sheerest of coincidences, and only the Earth among all the planets is blessed in this fashion."
15. Spaceship Moon Theory: As outrageous as it may sound, it is quite possible that the moon is a giant, intelligently designed spaceship, with a specific purpose. The facts lead us convincingly to such an insane conclusion. The only theory that is supported by all of the data, is that the moon is a gigantic extraterrestrial craft, brought here eons ago by intelligent beings, and there is no data that seems to contradict this theory.
(Thank you Ronald Regehr)
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