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Rhettorical

The rantings, views and commentary of a right-winged criminal justice student on current events, politics, law, and even life. The goal of this blog is to allow the writer to vent on articles and experiences that make him angry and to open up discussions in a hostile atmosphere. So please sit back and relax as I convert you to the dark side.

Name:
Location: Kansas, United States

I'm a single 23 year-old Christian (non-denom) male from an undisclosed location in Kansas. I am in the process of furthering my education and hopefully starting up a career in law enforcement.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Moonquakes?

According to this link scientist believe that The Moon suffers from quakes.

Odd, everything I have read said that The Moon wasn't capable of having seismic problems. I can't recall the source but it sure was faulty since they have had this data since 1977.

March 15, 2006: NASA astronauts are going back to the moon and when they get
there they may need quake-proof housing.That's the surprising conclusion of
Clive R. Neal, associate professor of civil engineering and geological sciences
at the University of Notre Dame after he and a team of 15 other planetary
scientists reexamined Apollo data from the 1970s. "The moon is seismically
active," he told a gathering of scientists at NASA's Lunar Exploration Analysis
Group (LEAG) meeting in League City, Texas, last October.
Between
1969 and 1972, Apollo astronauts placed seismometers at their landing sites
around the moon. The Apollo 12, 14, 15, and 16 instruments faithfully radioed
data back to Earth until they were switched off in 1977.

And what did
they reveal? There are at least four different kinds of moonquakes: (1) deep
moonquakes about 700 km below the surface, probably caused by tides; (2)
vibrations from the impact of meteorites; (3) thermal quakes caused by the
expansion of the frigid crust when first illuminated by the morning sun after
two weeks of deep-freeze lunar night; and (4) shallow moonquakes only 20 or 30
kilometers below the surface.
The first three were generally mild and
harmless. Shallow moonquakes on the other hand were doozies. Between 1972 and
1977, the Apollo seismic network saw twenty-eight of them; a few "registered up
to 5.5 on the Richter scale," says Neal. A magnitude 5 quake on Earth is
energetic enough to move heavy furniture and crack plaster. Furthermore, shallow
moonquakes lasted a remarkably long time. Once they got going, all continued
more than 10 minutes. "The moon was ringing like a bell," Neal says.


Wow! 5.5 on our scale. (Does gravity factor in? :P ) And ten minutes long?!

I'd imagine this would cause new problems. A quake in construction could rip a hole in a dwelling. A hole in your house may be a pretty big hazard to your health since all the oxygen would be ventilated out in space. Most humans like yours truly have a liking to oxygen, we like it even more when we miss it in such environments as on another planet.

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