Once I envisioned orbiting just above the mountain peaks of the moon. That would be quite scenic if possible, but as you suggest, the attraction of the moon to the ship varies along the orbit and I would eventually find myself flying into moon mountains which is not a good thing.
When you integrate the effects of all of the tiny increments of moon mass to arrive at a net attraction you discover how important the inverse square law is. That rock that is 10 meters away and weighs 1000 kilograms has an effect that is billions of times greater than its sister on the other side of the moon. Both of these masses contribute to the total moon mass, but the close by ones dominate the final tally. Dave -----Original Message----- From: ChemE Stewart <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, Dec 17, 2012 6:31 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:New Data "Worrying" 2000 climatologists about Global Warming .... G is not a constant. It is entropic acceleration. It is dependent upon the concentration of entropy in that area of space. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Verlinde Moon gravitational field varies widely, much higher around some craters. Apollo missions had to take into account the varying gravitational acceleration as they orbited the moon else it would throw them off. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/news/grail20121205.html See the ball would not bounce: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY1ITVF6tfc In the end gravity is the collapse of baryonic matter due to dark matter passing though it. Time also collapses on the surface of dark matter. Stewart Darkmattersalot.com On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: I wrote: His calculation was off by roughly factor of two, but our knowledge of the sun's distance has improved immeasurably since then, and we also know the mass of the earth more accurately. I should say we know the gravitational constant G more accurately. In the first approximation you ignore the mass of the planet. Strictly speaking the sun and planets orbit around their common centers of gravity, which must be very complicated indeed. - Jed
