• Question: How far is the moon from earth

    Asked by Faatimah to Michael, Lauren, Marisol, Sarah, Sophie on 14 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Michael Rivera

      Michael Rivera answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      It’s moments like these I’m so grateful to computer scientists for inventing the Internet!

      Like a good scientist, I did a bit of research. The moon is about 380,000 kilometres away… that is like if you were to go from London to Sydney and back 11 times!

      The Apollo missions of the 1960’s took about three days to reach the moon, and so with better technology these days, you might be able to reach it faster as an astronaut! However, one mission in the 1960’s costed around 1.3 billion dollars, and probably it costs a lot more these days!

      Michael 🙂

    • Photo: Marisol Collins

      Marisol Collins answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      Hi there! great question! I was only just learning about this today, as this is the day that we get a SUPER MOON in the UK!

      On average, the moon is 288,355 miles away from the earth (so NASA tells me). The reason this is an average distance, is that the orbit of the moon around the earth is not a circle, it is more like an ellipse, or oval. This means that there are times in the orbit where the moon is nearer to the earth than during the rest of its orbit (which takes about 27 days to complete) and right now is one of them. The moon will be around 30,000 miles nearer to the earth that at other times in its orbit. Aaaand, when the moon, the earth and the sun line up at a point during this orbit, the moon can appear bigger, especially if it’s a full moon. All of these things have come together this to happen at the same time for us today, so we should see the biggest super moon we have seen for nearly 70 years.

      To give you an idea of the distance between the moon and earth (and you can try this at school), if you imagine that the earth is a basket ball, this would make the moon about the size of a tennis ball. If we then want to get an idea of how far apart they are on this scale, you would need to put the tennis ball moon 23 feet and 7 inches away from the basket ball earth! You could use a measuring tape to help you. That’s a really cool way to look at it, huh?

      Be sure to look out for the rising moon this evening, around 5pm when the sun sets. Hopefully, if it is not cloudy, you will see a moon that’s around 14% bigger and 25% brighter than usual tonight! 🙂

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