Page 116 - How It Works - Book Of Amazing Answers To Curious Questions, Volume 05-15

How long
Why can we see the Moon could a

in the daytime?
stranded

he Moon is the second-brightest object in the sky and incredibly reflective of the

T Sun’s rays. This means the refl ected light can penetrate the scattered blue light astronaut
of the sky. Though it may seem that the Sun rises in the east while the Moon sets in
the west, the Sun and the Moon are only opposite each other in the sky when the survive on
Moon is at its full stage. In theory, the Moon is almost always visible in daytime,
except when it’s too close to the Sun (during a new moon) or too far away (during a the Moon?
full moon).
ow long a stranded astronaut
H could survive on the Moon would
depend very much on the supplies they
had with them, particularly oxygen.
While the average human can survive
What is the smallest thing for a few weeks without food and about
three days without water, just 16
in the universe? minutes of oxygen deprivation typically
leads to irreparable damage to the brain
and ultimately death within 30 minutes.
The longest Moon mission to date was
Apollo 17, during which astronauts
he concept of size spent 75 hours on the lunar surface.
T breaks down at the Had their lander been unable to return
tiniest scales, but scientists into orbit, they would only have had
think the smallest possible enough oxygen to last them a few days.
size for anything in the If we return to the Moon for a longer
universe is the Planck length, mission, astronauts may extract water
about a millionth of a billionth and oxygen by melting ice hidden deep
of a billionth of a billionth of a inside the Moon’s craters, allowing
centimetre across! them to survive for much longer.

116 How It Works