Air on the Moon...?

Hi, I have been wondering if there is air on the moon (not oxygen). I have heard stories about aliens that were on the moon, and didnt want us to be on there. Astronauts have said that the moon is way diffrent then what the average person thinks. If there isnt air, then how did the astronauts take their ship off from the moon? And how did they slow the ship down before landing on the moon?

If there isnt air, then how did the astronauts take their ship off from the moon? And how did they slow the ship down before landing on the moon?

Umm they fired thier landing rockets.

Below are some links regarding lunar missions that you may or may not be interested in. You will probably find an exact answer to your question here.

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...
spaceflight1.nasa.gov...

I haven't taken the time to review the total contents, but I am sure will find the answer within them somewhere.

It is my understanding that although there is no atmosphere as we know it (with all that lovely oxygen!!) we are still very capible of manuvering around it. Since there is very little atmosphere we are able to use Newton's first law of motion, which basically says:
An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
Because there is so little atmosphere on the moon we can estimate the distance our power source on the lunar module can carry us, and thus estimate how much power we need to use to land and not crash. I am sure there are sites on the internet with much more useful info than what I can provide, but it shouldn't be to hard to find.

Moon doesn't have anykind atmosphere.
Even if moon would have some source for atmosphere moon couldn't retain it, because of lacking magnetic field solar wind would strike directly to atmosphere literally stripping it away, also moon's gravity is too small to prevent gases from escaping.

Actually atmosphere would just cause other problems, for example friction of it means spaceship has to be shaped to be aerodynamically stable while in vacuum you don't have to worry about shape of your ship, just remember what kind "spiders" lunar modules were compared to command module which returned back to earth.


And basic principle behind rocket motors is Newton's third law.
www.daviddarling.info...
en.wikipedia.org...

Originally posted by E_T
Moon doesn't have anykind atmosphere.

"In decades past it was accepted that moons such as the Earth's moon or the moons of Jupiter were airless bodies with no atmosphere whatsoever. Now, however, measurements have shown that most of these moons are surrounded by a *very* this region of molecules which might be loosely classified as an atmosphere. Such is the case with the Moon."
www.windows.ucar.edu...=/earth/moon/lunar_atm.html&edu=high

It may be very thin, but it does have slight atmosphere.

Originally posted by anxietydisorder
It may be very thin, but it does have slight atmosphere.

In the end it's about what is defined as atmosphere... There's gas molecules even in space.
Which is like moon, for all practical means vacuum...

The surface experiments, consisting of Cold Ion Gauges in Apollos 14-16 and a Mass Spectrometer in Apollo 17, were so sensitive that leaks from the space suits of the astronauts saturated them every time that they approached to within a few metres.

These experiments revealed that there is a very tenuous lunar atmosphere, which has a total mass of only about 10 000Kg (10 tonnes).

www.iac.es...

And compare that to how much air there's above one square meter of earth's surface. (1 bar=100 kPa=100 kN/1 m² ~ 10 000 kg above 1 m²)