The Moon Sparkles the sky sky at night! Let’s discover five mesmerizing Moon facts for kids.
The Moon’s atmosphere is called the exosphere. The air in the exosphere is extremely thin and not breathable. The three primary gases in the Moon’s exosphere are neon, helium, and hydrogen and they are found in roughly equal amounts.
A satellite is an object that moves around a larger object. Earth is a satellite because it moves around the sun. The moon is a satellite because it moves around Earth. Earth and the moon are called “natural” satellites. Earth’s only natural satellite is called “the Moon” because before the astronomer Galilei discovered other moons, the Earth’s Moon was the only one people knew existed. The Moon goes around the Earth at a distance of about 385,000 kilometres. That is about 100 times as long as The Mississippi River.
The Moon is the only celestial body beyond Earth that has been visited by human beings. In 1969, Apollo 11 was launched and astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin travelled to the Moon. Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon and as he did he said “…one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. The Apollo astronauts brought back lunar rocks and soil to Earth to be studied.
The Moon has a diameter of 3,475 km, which is about eight times the length of the Grand Canyon. Of the over 200 moons orbiting planets in our solar system, the Earth’s Moon is the fifth largest.
The Moon is the Earth’s closest celestial body. Although the Moon looks big to us it is actually quite small when compared to Earth. The Moon’s surface area is roughly 38 million square km, which is less than the total surface area of the continent of Asia, which is 44.5 million square km.
The Earth and Moon are tidally locked and for this reason we only ever see one side of the Moon. The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth because it rotates around the Earth at the same pace that it orbits it. Tidal locking means that one side of an astronomical body always faces another. Tidal locking is also called synchronous rotation. In 1959, the first ever images of the far side of the moon were taken by the Soviet Luna 3 Spacecraft.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about the Moon as much as we loved teaching you about them. Now that you know how majestic the Moon is, you can move on to learn about our Solar System planets like: Solar System, Space, Milky Way, Asteroids and Black Holes.
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