Man in the Moon on the Back Side of Earth
“Earth’s magnetotail extends well beyond the orbit of the moon and, once a month, the moon orbits through it,” says Tim Stubbs, a University of Maryland scientist working at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This can have consequences ranging from lunar ‘dust storms’ to electrostatic discharges.”
***************************************************************************
Full moons have been associated with many things—suicide, mental illness, birthrates, and many other things. Hair is cut on a full moon, and certain plants are put in the ground on it, while others buy and sell stocks on it. Up until lately, five factors were found by three researchers—Kelly, Rotton, and Culver—to explain the full moon myths: media effects, folklore, cognitive biases, misconceptions, and communal reinforcement, saying that media reporters favored individuals who believed in these full moon beliefs.
Now, the full moon is scientifically associated with NASA’s upcoming human exploration with its ancient lunar craters and frozen lava seas. NASA-supported scientists have researched the moon and have found that every month on a full moon, something actually does happen to the moon. This happening is when the moon gets struck by the Earth’s magnetic tail, a tail very few people have ever known about.
The magnetic tail of Earth is considered to be an extension of the magnetic field that is around the Earth’s surface. This “bubble of magnetism” that envelopes our planet springs forth from a molten dynamo in the Earth’s core. Meanwhile, in space the solar wind presses against this invisible bubble which causes it to stretch and create a long “magnetotail” in a downwind direction. The way we recognize when the moon is inside the magnetotail is when the moon is full, occurring approximately three days before the moon is full—taking six days to cross—and then exiting on the other side. And strange things happen during these six days.
A gigantic plasma sheet of hot charged particles are trapped in the tail, coming into contact with the moon during the crossing. Electrons pepper the moon’s surface which causes the moon it have a negative charge, with the electron particles being the lightest and most mobile of all the trapped particles. During the cold nights on the moon, electrons will accumulate and surface voltages will climb to thousands of volts. But during the day, sunlight counteracts the effect with UV photons knocking the electrons off the lunar surface, which keeps the build-up of charge at a low level.
What will happen to astronauts at this time is they gather a load of excess electrical charge as they walk along the lunar surface. When they touch each other, a piece of metal, or any sensitive electronic—an electrical discharge will occur, with NASA strongly recommending proper grounding to prevent it. Another situation that occurs is the surface of the moon will lift off its surface, leaping into the sky. Fine particles of abrasive moondust will float from the ground, ejected by electrostatic repulsion.
The evidence has come from NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft, orbiting the moon from 1998 to 1999, monitoring the magnetotail crossings. Big changes in the night’s voltage were sensed during the crossings, jumping from “-200 V to -1000 V”, according to Jasper Halekas of UC Berkeley.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
