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The origin of the Moon is usually explained by a Mars-sized body striking the Earth, creating a debris ring that eventually collected into a single natural satellite, the Moon, but there are a number of variations on this giant-impact hypothesis, as well as alternative explanations, and research continues into how the Moon came to be formed.
On July 20, 1969, humans for the first time landed on the Moon and any extraterrestrial body, at Mare Tranquillitatis with the lander Eagle of the United States ' Apollo 11 mission. Five more crews were sent between then and 1972, each with two men landing on the surface. The longest stay was 75 hours by the Apollo 17 crew.
The Moon was the first new world on which humans set foot; the information brought back from those expeditions, together with that collected by automated spacecraft and remote-sensing observations, has led to a knowledge of the Moon that surpasses that of any other cosmic body except Earth itself.
Throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, investigators examined different theories on lunar origin in an attempt to find one that would agree with the observations. Lunar origin theories can be divided into three main categories: coaccretion, fission, and capture.
How did the Moon form? Earth’s Moon was born out of destruction. Several theories about our Moon’s formation vie for dominance, but almost all share that point in common: near the time of the solar system’s formation, about 4.5 billion years ago, something ― perhaps a single object the size of Mars, perhaps a series […]
Our Moon shares a name with all moons simply because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. In Latin, the Moon was called Luna, which is the main adjective for all things Moon-related: lunar.
The Moon is the only other planetary body that humans have visited. On July 20, 1969, NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to set foot on the dusty surface of the Moon.
The first detailed theory to explain the origins of Earth and the Solar System in scientific terms was the ‘nebular hypothesis’ proposed by the Swedish philosopher Immanuel Swedenborg in 1735, and developed by the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796.
How we discovered how the Moon formed. The importance of lunar rocks. The great scientists who uncovered the origin of the Moon. 1952 –Harold Urey publishes the first serious arguments that the Moon may have originated elsewhere in the Solar System and been captured into orbit around Earth at a later stage.
With the shocking launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957, the Moon changed from a distant silver disk in the sky to a real place, a probable destination for probes and people. The Soviets struck first, flying Luna 1 by the Moon in January 1959.