THE MOON People have always been interested in outer space It’s a beautiful and scary feeling to stare into the night sky and think about what’s out there One of the easiest and closest things we can see from Earth without any special tools is the moon How much do you really know about the moon And what is on the side we can’t see Scientists have studied the moon for years in search of answers and what they’ve discovered is amazing Out of This World While the moon may look close don’t be fooled It’s actually really far away The moon is about 238,855 miles 384,400 km away How far away is that That’s equal to 30 Earths lined up next to each other 4
Earth only has one moon Mercury and Venus don’t have any Saturn has 62 moons Jupiter has 69 moons and scientists have named 53 of them 5
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON For thousands of years people have wondered what’s on the back of the moon They’ve even nicknamed it the dark side of the moon Is it really always dark As it turns out the nickname isn’t exactly correct There’s no part of the moon that’s always dark As the moon rotates different parts of its surface receive sunlight However it orbits Earth at the same speed it rotates so the same side of the moon is always facing Earth Out of This World A better nickname for the side of the moon that we can’t see from Earth is the far side The part we can see from Earth can be called the near side 6
We can actually see 59 percent of the moon from Earth The other 41 percent can only be seen from space 7
