Something special is happening this weekend. Venus and the Moon are gathering for a sunset conjunction on Saturday and Sunday, May 15 and 16. On the same nights, the ISS is going to be flying over many US towns and cities.

And if Atlantis launches on schedule–wow! People could witness a very rare meeting of the shuttle, station, Venus and the Moon. Details and observing tips may be found in today’s story from Science@NASA.

The far side of the Moon may have once faced Earth, says a new study which argues that a massive asteroid impact billions of years ago could have flipped it through 180 degrees.

From Earth we only ever see one side of the Moon, as its rotation is locked with ours and it spins once for every orbit around the Earth.

Moon flip

However, crater patterns on the lunar surface suggest this orientation may not have always been the case, say scientists Mark Wieczorek and Mathieu Le Feuvre from the Paris Institute of Earth and Physics in France.

The idea of a Moon flip is not totally new. In 1975 researchers in the U.S. proposed that if a large enough asteroid slammed into the satellite, it would wobble back and forth like a pendulum before settling down in a locked rotation with only one face visible from Earth.

Until now, though, there has been no evidence to back up the theory.

For the new study, detailed this month in the journal Icarus, Wieczorek and Le Feuvre scoured images of the Moon’s cratering patterns. [...]

Source: Cosmos Online – click here for full article