Expert of the Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) The United States predicts the Moon will experience 100 meteor showers per day. This is because the Moon does not have an atmosphere to “filter” celestial bodies that enter its territory.
However, Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environmental Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said the phenomenon would not threaten the safety of astronauts about to land there.
NASA had studied this “possibility” when it sent humans to the Moon in 1969, one of which was anticipated to be space rock that might hit the astronauts’ equipment or spacesuits.
“The odds of an astronaut being hit by an object measuring one millimeter in size are like 1 in 1 million per hour per person,” Cooke told Live Science.
NASA postponed the target of sending humans back to the Moon until 2025. Previously, the United States space agency had targeted to send humans to the Moon in 2024.
NASA’s meteoroid environment office studies the space environment around Earth and the Moon to understand the flux of meteoroids, or space rocks of varying sizes from dust to small asteroids about 1 meter in diameter.
Cooke said meteoroids smaller than a millimeter can’t be counted precisely, but he estimates 11 to 1,100 tonnes of dust-sized material hit the Moon per day. As for larger rocks, around the size of a ping pong ball, the estimate is clearer.
“There are about 100 meteoroids the size of a ping pong ball hitting the Moon every day,” Cooke said.
This figure brings a total of about 33,000 meteoroids hitting the Moon per year. And despite their small size, each of these rocks the size of a ping pong ball hit the Moon’s surface with a force of 3.2 kilograms of dynamite.
Meteoroids larger than the size of a ping pong ball also hit the Moon, but with less frequency.
Cooke estimates that larger meteoroids, such as those measuring 2.5 meters, hit the moon every four years. Objects that size hit the Moon with a force of one kiloton, or 1,000 tons (900 metric tons) of dynamite.
The moon is predicted to be around 4.5 billion years old. This condition makes the surface has many holes and craters due to the impact.
(lom / mik)
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