First-ever consistent physical model of the Earth-Moon system

Sebastián Escalón for CNRS:

NASA plans to return to the Moon in 2027. Yet to get there, the astronauts will have to travel a little bit further than their Apollo 11 predecessors: about an extra two metres! This is quite simply because our satellite moves a few centimetres further away every year, due to the tidal force exerted by the Moon on the Earth. The first person to understand this celestial mechanism was the son of the great Charles Darwin, George. In 1880 he postulated that the gravitational pull of the Moon deformed the Earth’s surface by creating a bulge that does not directly point towards the Moon…

Nov 25, 2022 Gravity