Anomaly detected under the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin

originally posted by: McGinty
less mass increases the force of the planets gravity

According to that you have less mass than the moon so you have more gravity so we should be able to put objects in orbit around you like we did around the moon. I think you got your wires crossed. Even if you never understand Newton's gravitation equation, you should be able to understand this:

originally posted by: OneBigMonkeyToo

originally posted by: LSU2018
a reply to: LookingAtMars

What about the size of it? If it's the size of HI then would it throw the moon off of its orbit or anything? If you mined it, needed the resources, and removed it all?

The amount of money and resources required to do any kind of lunar mining is never going to be repaid by what they mine. The only use for anything mined on the moon is on the moon, so it's not going to be changed by anything we can do to it.

So the mass wouldn't change because of mining anyway.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: McGinty
less mass increases the force of the planets gravity

According to that you have less mass than the moon so you have more gravity so we should be able to put objects in orbit around you like we did around the moon. I think you got your wires crossed.

To be fair I think he was trying to say that the influence of Earth's gravitational field would increase if the moon had less mass

originally posted by: OneBigMonkeyToo
To be fair I think he was trying to say that the influence of Earth's gravitational field would increase if the moon had less mass

It's not clear either way but that is also not true. The gravitational force resulting from an object like the moon being attracted to Earth is proportional to the mass, so if the moon had less mass, then there would be less force accelerating it toward the Earth, not more, which you probably already know, but for the sake of anybody who doesn't know that.

This relates to the legendary Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment, where Galileo is said to have dropped two spheres with different masses, which accelerated at the same rate. Since it's easier to accelerate less massive objects, the only way this could happen is if there was less force on the less massive object, so reducing the mass reduces the force applied to the object by the exact amount needed so they both accelerate at the same rate.

Whatever it is if it is worth money and humans get there hands on it there will be a war over it. Prime real estate up there on the moon. More and more nations are sending space craft up there. As soon as it gets commonplace for humans to move back and forth from the earth to the moon we will fight over it. It seems to be in our nature to do so. I hope not.