Was Dark Side of Moon once not Dark?

William Atkins
Thursday, 29 January 2009 19:32

Science - Space

According to French geophysicists, the Moon, during its early formation, may have been rotated 180 degrees, so that the dark side of the Moon faced the Earth. The researchers say this change probably happened when an impact changed the Moon’s rotation. Did this really happen, or was it caused by space aliens?


French geophysicists Mark Wieczorek and Mathieu Le Feuvre contend the Moon was hit approximately four billion years ago by a large object that altered its rotation.

Because of this impact, the Moon now rotates once on its axis for each orbit it takes around the Earth.

Such action results in us Earthlings seeing the Near-side of the Earth from our vantage point and never directly seeing the Far Side of the Earth; that is, unless you are one of the NASA Apollo astronauts that journeyed around the Moon during the 1960s and 1970s .

Several countries have sent spacecraft around the Moon to indirectly photograph the Far Side of the Moon, with the first one being in 1959 when the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 spacecraft took the first images of the back side of the Moon.

The paper by Drs. Wieczorek and Le Feuvre in the journal Icarus is entitled “Did a large impact reorient the Moon?”. It became available online on December 31, 2008.

The authors, Wieczorek and Le Feuvre, are from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Saint Maur des Fossés (National Center for Scientific Research's Institute of Earth Physics in Paris), France.

Page two contains passages from their abstract.