How long did it take to form the moon?

Answer 1

It depends on how fast the craft is travelling, and whether there are humans onboard. The slowest ever journey to the moon was by the ESA SMART-1 lunar probe, which took 1 year, 1 month and 2 weeks.

Apollo 11, the first manned flight to the Moon, took 3 days, 3 hours and 49 minutes to reach lunar orbit.

The fastest trip took 8 hours and 35 minutes, and was achieved by NASA's New Horizons Pluto mission.

Answer 2

A meteorites is usually cold when it reaches the surface. When a meteor enters the atmosphere it is briefly subjected to intense heat. This heat goes into melting the surface of the meteor, which is then quickly stripped away by drag. As a result, relatively little heat penetrates into the interior, which is cold from its time in space. By the time a meteor enters the lowest layer of the atmosphere it will have slowed to terminal velocity and so there will be no appreciable frictional heating.

Answer 3

It took 100 to 200 years for the debris from the Theia/Proto-Earth colision to coalesce into two moons. About 10-million years later, the smaller of the two moons slowly impacted onto the larger moon, resulting in the Moon we see today.

Answer 4

The prevailing theory is that the Moon was formed around 4.5 billion years ago, shortly after Earth's formation. This occurred when a Mars-sized object collided with Earth, leading to the debris coalescing to form the Moon.

Answer 5

1 billion years