NASA Award Paper


The Moon represents tides, phases and mysterious rhythms. As you settle into the reality of living and breathing with another person, you begin to feel 'in sync' with them-or perhaps not! If your emotional needs and expressions seem to interact and flow harmoniously as time goes on, you can bet that your lunar energies are connected. If, on the other hand, you find yourself drawing a complete blank as to what your partner is thinking or feeling, then this lunar connection is missing in some way. Full moons on different days. Where you live on earth rarely makes a difference as to whether the moon is full, quarter or new. This is because it takes the moon almost a month to travel around the earth and it only takes a day for the earth to turn around once. So in comparison, the moon sort of sits in the sky and waits for us to see what phase it is in. Still, there are times when the moon will be full on different calendar days in different areas of the earth. A moon is a natural body that is in orbit around a planet, and it is kept in place by both the host planet's gravity and the gravity of the moon itself. Some planets possess orbiting moons; some do not. There are several theories explaining how Earth's Moon came to be. At this point, the favored model is termed the giant impact theory, often playfully called the Big Whack or Big Splash theory by astronomers when they are in a humorous frame of mind. These funny nicknames were derived from the central tenet of the theory, which is that a Mars-sized body, named Theia, smacked into the primordial Earth billions of years ago. The collision caused part of our planet's crust to be hurled violently into space. Some of this shattered, somersaulting debris was snared into Earth-orbit, where it formed a host of moonlets that were ultimately pulled together by gravity to evolve into our Moon.