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Some people see a boldness in the lunation ; others see a rabbit or a toad . But regardless of what you see on the lunar surface , we all view the same side of our natural satellite . So why do n’t we ever see the far side of the moon ?
From Earth , it appears as ifthe moondoesn’t revolve at all , but itdoes spin on its axis , just like Earth does . However , the moon is tidally locked to our planet . That means it takes just as long for the moon to rotate about its axis as it does to orbit Earth — roughly one month .
The far side of the moon has lots of craters and fewer dark spots than the side that faces Earth.
Tidal lockup occurs thanks togravitational attractionbetween two supernal body . The attraction between the moon and Earth distorts both bodies and stretches them slenderly toward each other , into a human body resembling an American football game , saidRobert Tyler , a forcible oceanographer atNASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center . " That would be the shape if all the fluids and solidness could answer instantaneously , " Tyler told Live Science .
But the fluids and solid that make up both the moon and Earth ca n’t respond instantly . When the two body root for on each other , they make rubbing that slows the revolution of both object .
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The far side of the moon has lots of craters and fewer dark spots than the side that faces Earth.
For model , " the moon is pull on the ocean , so part of the ocean is attempt to propagate in a way that would , ideally , make a extrusion that was staying right under the moon , " Tyler tell . But " the tides are dragging across the seafloor and trying to get around continents . " It claim clock time and vigor to move the tidal protrusion — the goal of the football game — in response to the lunar month ’s movement around our planet .
The same thing find as rock-and-roll on the moonshine shift in response to Earth ’s pull . " rock are not pliable . When they get flexed , the vigor is going to be used up,“Matija Ćuk , an orbital dynamicist at the SETI Institute , recite Live Science . " Energy has to fall from somewhere , so it come from the revolution of the body . " The moon ’s gyration relative to Earth slowed down , until it eventually reached zero .
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The moonlight is also slowing Earth ’s rotation . Half a billion days ago , Earth might have had a 21 - hour twenty-four hours , Tyler said . If given enough sentence , the moon could slow our planet ’s revolution enough that it could become tidally locked to the moon , and only one side of our satellite would ever see the moonshine . But that would n’t happen for another50 billion years — long after thedeath of the sunabout5 billion year from now .
Although we ’ll never see the far side of the moon directly from Earth , ballistic capsule have shoot it . Soviet spacecraftLuna 3captured the first images of the far side in 1959 . Since then , several other space vehicle have snapped photos of the lunar far side , including NASA ’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter andChina ’s Chang’e 4 , the first spacecraft to land on the far side of the lunar month .
The images show that the moon ’s far side iscovered in cratersand has fewer big , dark spots — ring mare — than the near side . With fewer maria , it ’s arduous to pick out shapes like a face or a rabbit in the lunar far side , but there ’s still peck to see .
