​For a long time, people believed that the Moon could be inhabited, that there were forests, seas and inhabitants, whom some with great imagination called Selenites. When the first probes reached the moon, it was clear that nothing could live there, and the probes also showed that one side of the moon is always hidden from our view. Why such things? What myths exist about this invisible part of the Moon.

An unseen face fuels conspiracy theories

Why can’t we see the entire surface of the Moon from Earth? The Moon always faces the Earth with the same face, which means that part of the Moon always remains hidden from our eyes. But it would be a mistake to call this side “the dark side of the moon”, as the title of the famous Pink Floyd album sounded.

This hidden, rough face of the moon was first photographed by a Soviet space probe called Luna 3 in 1959, and humans first saw it directly in 1968 by astronauts on the American Apollo 8 mission.

The Invisible Face has spawned a number of outlandish conspiracy theories: that various species of aliens are based there, knowing we can’t detect their presence. If humans tried to launch a satellite there, the shuttle would be destroyed, said the very imaginative.

Even more inventive voices have said that the US military has military bases on the far side of the moon, bases it apparently doesn’t want the rest of the world to know about.

Conspiracy theories didn’t start out of nowhere: In 1959, the US Air Force created Project Horizon, which wanted to put a military base on the moon and even detonate a nuclear bomb to intimidate the USSR.

The program was quickly shelved, but for the first time there was talk of placing modules in the lunar regolith (the very fine dust that covers the surface of the Moon) or extracting oxygen from the regolith, concepts that are still used in plans for future lunar outposts.

Another face that attracted the Chinese

This hidden face is very different from the visible one. The face we see consists of huge plains of cooled lava called “maria” (Latin for sea). The far side is full of craters because asteroids crashed into it.

China’s Chang’e 4 probe landed there in 2019.

It was an image blow for China, a country that wanted to show that its space program had become a world-class one, a success that was important from a technical point of view, but also symbolically. The Yutu 2 rover sent back information about the soil in this crater after using a ground-scanning radar.

NASA’s lunar rover has also sent back many pictures in recent years.

The Moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago, and at first it rotated very quickly around its own axis, but over time the Earth’s gravity slowed this rotation. The period of rotation of the Moon around its own axis decreased, becoming equal to the rotation around the Earth, that is, about 27 days. This phenomenon is called synchronous rotation, and one of the consequences is that the Moon always looks at the Earth with the same face.

It is not always night or total darkness on the far side of the Moon. As with the visible side of the Moon, the hidden side of the Moon also has a full lunar cycle of day and night, which lasts approximately 29.5 days.

Although it is not completely dark on the far side of the Moon, it is often referred to as the “dark side of the Moon” because it is less well known and less explored than the visible side.

But why does the moon always show the same face to the earth? The same side of the Moon is visible from Earth, because the Moon has a synodic period equal to the period of its rotation (27.3 days), this phenomenon is called synchronous rotation. Therefore, the complementary part is invisible from Earth, and nothing was known about it until it was photographed more than 60 years ago.

Synchronous rotation describes the rotation of one celestial body around another, where the orbital period of the satellite is equal to the orbital period of the body relative to which it rotates, and therefore always points the same hemisphere towards the body with which it rotates. respect to