MadSci Network: Astronomy
Query:

Re: It is possible to deviate the moon from it's orbit by the man?

Date: Mon Jul 10 22:08:19 2000
Posted By: Steve Furlanetto, Grad student, Astronomy, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Area of science: Astronomy
ID: 962702317.As
Message:

This is essentially a question of how much extra energy we have to give to the moon in order to significantly affect the moon's orbit around the earth (in other words, how hard and for how long would we have to push the moon to push it off track?). The moon is held in its orbit by the gravitational attraction of the earth, and it takes energy input to tear the moon away.

Your question then boils down to whether all the atomic weapons on earth could provide enough energy to lift the moon away from the earth. (It is actually more complicated than this, because you need to come up with some way to make sure that all that energy goes into just lifting the moon, and not creating heat or explosive blast waves. But let's assume that we've come up with some way to channel all the energy from the explosion into lifting the moon.) This amount of course depends on how far you want to lift the moon away from the earth. To lift the moon a mile would cost 10^25 Joules; to lift the moon twice as far from the earth as it is now would cost 10^30 Joules.

Joules are a unit of energy; for comparison, eating a kilogram of donuts gives your body about 10^7 Joules. A big hydrogen bomb yields about 10^17 Joules of energy. So, to lift the moon even one mile (less than a tenth of a percent of its radius!) by giving it 10^25 Joules would take 100 million hydrogen bombs, lots more than anybody has! To move the moon to twice its current distance would take 10 trillion nuclear bombs!

So, the answer to your question is "No" - not even all the weapons on earth could move the moon significantly! Nuclear weapons are, however, one of the methods that people talk about to divert asteroids or comets that are on course to hit the earth. Even this is extraordinarily difficult. We would need to find the asteroid while it is still quite far away and still hope that it is very small!


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