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Irregular moons are probably minor planets that have been captured from surrounding space. Most irregular moons are less than 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) in diameter. The earliest published discovery of a moon other than Earth's was by Galileo Galilei, who discovered the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. Over the following three ...
The Artemis program is a Moon exploration program led by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), formally established in 2017 via Space Policy Directive 1. It is intended to reestablish a human presence on the Moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Intended to orbit the Moon and return to Earth. All first-stage engines shut down 10 seconds after launch; launch vehicle crashed and exploded on the launch pad. Spacecraft landed safely 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the launch site after using launch escape sequence. [68] 71: Luna 15 (E-8-5 No.401) Luna 15: 13 July 1969: Proton-K/D: Lavochkin: Lander
The moon takes about 30 days to orbit the Earth, which is called a lunar cycle. Each lunar cycle is divided into eight phases based on the moon's position relative to the sun.
Orion capsule of Artemis 1 above the Moon in December 2022. In astronomy and spaceflight, a lunar orbit (also known as a selenocentric orbit) is an orbit by an object around Earth's Moon. In general these orbits are not circular. When farthest from the Moon (at apoapsis) a spacecraft is said to be at apolune, apocynthion, or aposelene.
The seven largest natural satellites in the Solar System (those bigger than 2,500 km across) are Jupiter's Galilean moons (Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa), Saturn's moon Titan, Earth's moon, and Neptune's captured natural satellite Triton. Triton, the smallest of these, has more mass than all smaller natural satellites together.
The object orbits the Sun but makes slow close approaches to the Earth–Moon system. Between 29 September (19:54 UTC) and 25 November 2024 (16:43 UTC) (a period of 1 month and 27 days) [4] it passed just outside Earth's Hill sphere (roughly 0.01 AU [1.5 million km; 0.93 million mi]) at a low relative velocity (in the range 0.002 km/s (4.5 mph) – 0.439 km/s [980 mph]) and will become ...
Gravitational accelerations at L 4. The Hill sphere is the region in which an astronomical body dominates the attraction of satellites. Of the Solar System planets, Neptune and Uranus have the largest Hill spheres, due to the lessened gravitational influence of the Sun at their far orbits, however all of the giant planets have Hill spheres in the vicinity of 100 million kilometres in radius.