What if the moon orbited at the same distance as the International Space Station?

YouTube

What if the moon orbited at the same distance as the International Space Station?
(Image credit: YouTube)

A skilled animator on YouTube imagined what it would look like:

Pretty cool! According to Phil Plait, this is sped up quite a bit; the moon would take about five minutes to cross the sky. It's worth noting that if it were that close, we'd all be killed by earthquakes; tides would be 100,000 times stronger than they are now, and the sheer gravitational stress on the moon would rip it apart into Saturn-style rings.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.