100 million miles to the moon?

Forum: SSI-List
Thread: 100 million miles to the moon?

# 18392 byIan Woollard on Sept. 29, 2003, 12:23 p.m.
Member since 2022-08-22

Is this right?
Nope, you're out by almost 3 orders of magnitude(!)

For the maths impaired; the Earth is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the Sun but the Earth is only 384 thousand km (about 240 thousand miles) from the moon (a km is 5/8 of a mile- near enough, or if you're NASA, equal [ok, cheap shot :-) ] )

see: http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/luna.html
If so, then there must be a lot of orbits, and gravity assists.
Lots of orbits, no gravity assists (well not exactly anyway), there's no gravity assists available until you get up to near the orbit of the moon.
60 liters of fuel, that's impressive.
Yes-ish. Takes a bit of a long while though. 15 months IRC.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=3518910

TangoMan