I’m not sure there is one. I’d imagine it would be more of a region than a line.
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Well yeah, not a line! But instead of the dark side or the facing side, I’d love to see the side that showed both and the area where they meet. Is it a clear demarcation over ‘only’ 5 miles or such, or a very fuzzy several-hundred-mile band? That sort of thing.
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The side with all of the large, dark areas (the lunar maria) is the side that faces the Earth.
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Thanks! But that’s not close enough to show detail. Just the difference between all the dust on our side, versus the much harder surface facing the outside, stuff like that. Maybe it isn’t obvious to look at because it’s a continuum.
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I wonder if there’d be a difference between the leading and the trailing side of the moon, too. You’d think that there would be more impacts in the direction of orbit, but I have no idea whether that’s actually the case.
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I think it is a continuum, but in any case, there would not be too narrow a band because of libration. The Moon keeps the same side toward us because its rotation and revolution have the same period, but the former happens at constant speed and the latter varies over its orbit. That means there is about 18% of the surface that can face toward or away at different times.
The moon with the biggest difference between hemispheres is Iapetus, which besides being locked with Saturn is provided with a stream of dust from the next moon out, Phoebe. Even it turns out to be pretty patchy:
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So cool!
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Reminds me of a certain fictional story…
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Short answer: No. The size, setup times, etc. make them unsuitable for military roles. The article never mentions whether these use cryogenic propellants or not.
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I’m glad that’s settled. i’m sure Mike Pompeo will shup up about this now.
Next problem.
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Disappointing, but in no way surprising:
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They realized too late that they couldn’t build windmills on Mars.
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Sure they can. They’d just be hilariously inefficient.
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And, of course, there are no bodies of water that need to held back by dykes, so they figured “what’s the point?”
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That’s all inventions for domestic use, though. For non-domestic stuff, there’s the invention of the flijt style of ship, the invention of the microscope, and the history of colonisation to fall back on – although hopefully that would be less awful and destructive this time than previous attempts.
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