Theron Rinehart, age 8, of Sierra Vista, Arizona, for his question:
Is there any heat on the moon?
There is indeed heat on the moon, but it comes and goes. Sometimes the lunar landscape gets hot enough to turn a tank of water into a cloud of steam and boil your blood. Sometimes it gets cold enough to freeze you solid.
Our hot weather comes from the sun and our cold spells come when some places are getting less than their share of warm sunbeams. The moon is our nearest neighbor in the sky and both of us are about the same distance from the sun. You would expect the earth and the moon to get the same kind of weather, the same summer heat and the same winter cold. But this is not so at all. The sky is full of surprises. For instance, the moon loops over our sky and seems to circle clear around our globe every calendar day. But really it does not do this at all.
The real path of the moon fools our eyes and experts had to strain their brains to figure out that each trip around our planet takes about four earth weeks. Likewise, the experts have determined that the moon's weather is not at all like the hot spells and cold spells we have on the earth. They knew this ages before we landed spacecraft on the moon. Those clever gadgets took the temperature of the lunar landscape and reported back that the scientists had figured out the truth.
The moon gets hottest when the dazzling sun is blazing straight down on its bumpy face. At high noon, the temperature of the lunar landscape rises to about 212 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the right temperature to boil water and turn it into cloudy steam. Thank goodness we never get t.hat much heat on the earth. The oceans would boil away and if we went outdoors without air conditioned suits, we would sizzle into crispy bits.
As the moon rotates on its axis and night comes on, all the scorching heat of day escapes up and away into the starry sky. The temperature of the lunar ground drops down to about minus 270 degrees. Thank goodness the earth's worst weather never gets anywhere as cold as this. The poor old moon gets the same sizzling heat every day and the same shuddering cold every night, but this change does not happen every 24 hours. The round moon spins very slowly to face the sun with first one side, then the other. The seething lunar day lasts about two earth weeks and the shuddering lunar night also lasts about two earth weeks. Its heat and its cold are so extreme because the moon has no air to gentle down the hot rays of the day and no airy blanket to hold some of the day's heat through the night.
Our wondrous earth is wrapped in a huge blanket of airy atmosphere. It filters out the worst of the sun's scorching, heat. Our cloudy skies also stop some of the day's heat from escaping up into the starry sky. What's more, our earth spins faster than the moon and our days and nights are much shorter. Our breezy blanket of air gentles the sun's heat and twirls it into changeable spells of weather. The moon has no atmosphere to shield it from the sun's seething heat, no clouds or airy breezes. No rain or snow falls on the lunar landscape, and there is no earth type weather on the moon at all.