Describe the impact theory of the moon's origin?

Answer 1

Mars sized object collided w/ earth. Junk broke off and formed the moon.

Answer 2

What Cosmo should have said:
"The basic idea is this: about 4.45 billion years ago, a young planet Earth -- a mere 50 million years old at the time and not the solid object we know today-- experienced the largest impact event of its history. Another planetary body with roughly the mass of Mars had formed nearby with an orbit that placed it on a collision course with Earth. When young Earth and this rogue body collided, the energy involved was 100 million times larger than the much later event believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. The early giant collision destroyed the rogue body, likely vaporized the upper layers of Earth's mantle, and ejected large amounts of debris into Earth orbit. Our Moon formed from this debris."

From his listed source.

Another words: The proto-earth was a cooling ball of plasma and turned into a solid chunk, then a catastrophic and huge collision hit. A rogue planet, the size of Mars, smashed into the proto-earth knocking off a huge piece of it.

Once again the earth was converted into a plasma and had to cool and reform. Meanwhile, the chunk that had been blown free cooled and collected itself to form the moon. Thus the moon is actually a big piece of earth rock.

The moon has such a light core and is so similar to the Earth that it had to be the result of a glancing collision that broke it off from the newly formed earth.

This is why it is so important to get rocks or meteors from an asteroid, comet or another moon. We spent decades studying the moon rocks only to turn out that we were studying a part of the old earth. The asteroid Apothos is due to pass so close to the earth in 2036 that it will be under our weather satellites! A mission to that would be more important than a return to the moon just to beat China. Hello! We did that in 1969! The only reason we should return to the moon is if we find water there. NASA has had a lot of trouble doing that, and are currently hoping to find the remains of a comet that crashed into a crater and remained in shadow so it wouldn’t all melt. The chances of that are pretty slim. Of course we could send a mission to a comet and force it to collide into the moon. That doesn’t sound as hard as you think. We can use a remote controlled low power engine to constantly work on the comet as it passes around the earth and comes back toward the earth’s orbit. Something like the Ion Engine, this has turned the Pluto Probe New Horizions, into the fastest moving object in space. This type of engine has weak, but constant acceleration. Build it on a gimble and launch it into the comet. Once it starts adjusting the course of the comet it will take a while and the comet will probably break up under the stress, but we can send the comet against the dark side of the moon for a safe collision. Then we can have water on the moon.

Water is one of the heaviest and most useful and necessary compounds for life. We almost always find life in the presence of water. It is heavy to lift and we need to resupply it, we can break it up into breathable oxygen and fuel as well. Without a source of water the planned base is going to be much harder to sustain. That’s why NASA has spent so much time looking for water on Mars.

Answer 3

The impact theory of the moon's formation was first proposed in the mid-1970s and is now widely accepted. According to this hypothesis, Earth's moon formed from a collision between the early Earth and a Mars-sized object. Both Earth and its impactor had already formed iron cores before the collision, leaving their outer layers relatively iron-poor.

The iron-poor outer portion of each body is blasted into orbit around the planet. Due to gravitational forces, the impactor's core eventually joined Earth's. Much of the material that was blasted into orbit eventually coalesced to form the moon. The animation covers only about 24 hours of simulated time, ending before the moon formed from the debris.

Answer 4

here is one google site out of many.

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question38.html

Dan has a very good elaborative explanation of the event.

I chose not to describe it here in case this was the questioner's term paper subject. I got that impression from the way the question was worded. In which case, it would be better to understand the subject for oneself before writing about it and copying words. My apologies. I should not have clicked on this question.

Answer 5

Do your own homework.