NASA on the Moon – Lunar Gravity Shifting
Scientists say that a recent analysis of a Lunar Laser Ranging data record across a period of 38.7 years revealed an anomalous increase of the eccentricity of the lunar orbit.
This phenomena occurring in the interiors of both the Earth and the Moon, cannot be explained say expert in quantum cosmology.
They have examined numerous dynamical effects, not modeled in the data analysis, in the framework of long-range modified models of gravity and of the standard Newtonian/Einsteinian paradigm. The results are puzzling since none of them can explain the current magnitude of eccentricity.
Apparently, the general relativistic ‘gravitomagnetic acceleration’ of the Moon due to the Earth’s angular momentum has the right order of magnitude, but the resulting Lense-Thirring secular effect for the eccentricity vanishes, published scholar Lorenzo Iorio, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Journal. A potentially viable Newtonian candidate would be a trans-Plutonian massive object, argued Iorio, like Planet X/Nemesis/Tyche.
Nevertheless, the scholar says that these possibilities encounter a disagreement with both the most recent theoretical scenarios envisaging the existence of a distant, planetary-sized body and with the model-independent constraints on them dynamically inferred from planetary motions.
Therefore, he concludes that the issue of finding a probable rationalization for the anomalous behavior of the Moon’s eccentricity is still under question.
Interesting enough is the fact that over the New Year’s weekend, a pair of NASA spacecraft arrived back-to-back at their destination in the first mission devoted to studying lunar gravity.
The Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) probes are designed to map the moon’s lumpy gravitational field, which is stronger over the maria (facing Earth) than in the highlands (on the dark side), announced NASA.
Learning about the moon’s gravity field will tell scientists about its interior, and perhaps whether it did in fact swallow a smaller sibling sometime in its past.