"If The Moon Got Nuked ... And Fragmented" Topic

Would't the gravitational effect on Earth be the nearly same regardless if the Moon was solid or was fragmented as long as the orbiting mass was the same?

I'm just trying to justify the concept of ruined terrain like the extreme types shown in the film Oblivion. They almost make it look as though the Earth's wobbling was almost as bad as if we lost the moon completely.

The one shown in the Time Machine remake seems similar but, though quite a cataclysm, didn't seem to create the giant tsunamis described in Oblivion.

link

link

Wouldn't the fragments eventually clump together again, with time?

Thoughts?

Dan

depends upon the angular momentum imparted upon fragments at the time of the event, and how many detached..

The Mediterranean Sea would no longer have tides.

Don't forget Thundarr the Barbarian.

It seems to me that if the moon were to be destroyed, there would be a period of instability. All the various chunks of the former Luna will have their own gravitational influence, which will act upon one another as well as the Earth. Their momentum will be changed by whatever hit Luna hard enough to break it up; everything will end up in different orbits. Earth might end up with a number of new moons (and possibly a ring system?) but I suppose that the tides would be meagre compared to now, as well as more complex to predict.

Ron

All the various chunks of the former Luna will have their own gravitational influence,

which, in the images shown, would have almost the same vector to the Earth. Damn little difference to perturbations.

Their momentum will be changed by whatever hit Luna hard enough to break it up…

seems more worrying, as any change in the orbit would have pretty large changes on Earth.

However, given the close grouping of the 'pieces', and the period since the damage, they don't seem to be moving apart, which pretty much makes no sense ("Wouldn't the fragments eventually clump together again, with time?"), as the masses would either have sufficient energy to be moving away quickly, or be crashing back together.

Gravity, in it's inverse square law, is a very harsh mistress.

Doug

There is always the Endor Holocaust to consider:
link

As long as the debris was still in orbit the effects would not change, HOWEVER. Much of the debris would likely shower down into earth's gravity well raining destruction on us and wrecking the planetary biosphere.

Also, if you combined all the nuclear weapons ever built into one attack on the moon, all you would get is a crater.

In order to damage the moon's integrity you would have to it it with something very big or something moving at a high fraction of Cee.

Only Warlock,

You mean only if it was hit by something like a very large asteroid/comet/planetoid then?

Dan

My fav.

Tides will be completely messed up. The Earth's wobble would eventually get worse (or less) but that might take millions of years. Since the orbit is stable (for our purposes) for the Moon's current mass and whatever caused the fragmentation will impart force on the fragments, a good chunk of the moon will collide with Earth and another good chunk will fly off into space. In short, game over for Earth as we now know it.

The reason for the fragmentation would be a big deal, since that'd be the equivalent of living next door to a giant, cosmic frag grenade.
Not good news.

On the upside, if it's a space fantasy thing, just go with what looks cool.

As Only Warlock pointed out, the debris hitting Earth would have cataclysmic consequences for all life on our planet… if you think the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs was a big deal, you ain't seen nothing yet!

It's also worth noting that big "clouds" of debris like that aren't likely to stick around for long. They'd get ground into dust though I'm not sure what the time frames for that are.

"If The Moon Got Nuked … And Fragmented"

Everyone would blame someone else.

I'm recalling the sadly brief TV series "Three Moons Over Milford".

Like Dynaman said the oceanic tides would go to pot! That's a very important part of a stabilized "safe" habitual world for humans so not good at all!!!

As an aside, I am reminded of that new Counterspy game.The Americans and Soviets are both planning to blow up the moon with nukes and you have to sneak in and sabotage their efforts :)

1) You can't do that level of destruction with nuclear weapons. They operate in the multi-megaton range at best. The largest ever tried, the Tsar Bomba was in the 2.1 × 10 17 range (50 megatons). To do that kind of damage you are talking 5 × 10 30 joules (1 zettaton). So you need somewhere around 100,000,000,000,000 giant nukes to do the job if my shaky math is right! link

2) The moon has been shattered before. That is how it formed. If it really shattered enough would rain down on the earth to destroy all life. The rest would form a ring, then over time reclump into a new moon. As pointed out before, the images shown wouldn't last long. pieces that big would clump together rather quickly with I would guess quite a show of crashes.

Momentum imparted towards (or away from) the Earth wouldn't really change the orbit much. Some of the fragments accelerated along their orbit would escape. The ones to watch out for would be the ones pushed the wrong way.

Actually it wasn't shattered before if you believe the history and discovery channel. It was created by a mars sized planet colliding with a young still molten earth and ejecting billions of tons of debri from both worlds into orbit which overtime coalesced into the moon :) sadly I remember all this stuff!

The very first thing I thought of when reading the title post was John The OFM's posting.

57 MT,to be close to exact,EJ.

There are too many unknown factors to take into consideration to form any kind of "guesstimate". That being said, I'm amazed at how many of our respondents must have advanced scientific degrees to form their responses. So unless you have a strong working knowledge of astro-physics, ballistics, meteorology, and several other sciences, I'm not sure any of the above respondents know what would happen. Oh yes, and by the way, I am a rocket scientist!

But gundog they are wargamers. Wargamers know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING.

Completely disagree gundog; there is PLENTY of information available to form a reasonable set of guesses. No, we can't say for certain what WOULD happen, but we could come up with a set of well-informed possible scenarios.

-Will

Won't somebody think of the werevolves?

I have seen a couple of documentaries on how the Moon was formed, and even on how the Moon's orbits are getting longer and it is moving away from Earth about 1 cm per year (if I remember correctly).

But I haven't seen any documentaries on what would happen to Earth if the Moon was suddenly struck by a large asteroid/comet/planetoid.

Are there any such documentary films? Clips?

Thanks,

Dan

None of us have degrees in ballistics but we still make games about what happens when an anti-tank gun hits a vehicle :)

If the moon did collapse ? Most likely we wouldn't have to worry about Iranian and N. Korean nucs, Putin, islamic terrorists/jihadis, global warming, etc. …

Legion4,

Let's nuke it then! :)

But we would need Bruce Willis and his oil drilling team to plant all the nukes very deep under the surface, right?

Dan

I'm not sure … But maybe we could direct parts of the moon or asteroid to places where no real harm would be done, if those locations were hit …