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by 0_____0 476 days ago
Oh wow, good reading in that link.

I had no idea the moon was that lumpy. The wiki entry says that despite the mascons there are 4 known stable orbital inclinations?

1 comments

That is correct. The NASA page link (now 404) has a bit more on the orbits and their history.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210307002503/https://science.n...

And they're very lumpy.

> The mascons' gravitational anomaly is so great—half a percent—that it actually would be measurable to astronauts on the lunar surface. "If you were standing at the edge of one of the maria, a plumb bob would hang about a third of a degree off vertical, pointing toward the mascon," Konopliv says. Moreover, an astronaut in full spacesuit and life-support gear whose lunar weight was exactly 50 pounds at the edge of the mascon would weigh 50 pounds and 4 ounces when standing in the mascon's center.

That is a great link. Do you know if any of it is outdated now?
It is still all completely correct. There may be some new findings, but the lunar prospector ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Prospector ) did all the work and this was written after that.