The moon moves 3.8 centimeters (1.5 inches) farther away from Earth each year.

Why time ticks faster on the moon, which may need its own time zone

While the sun, moon, and stars rise and set from east to west due to Earth's rotation, the moon's eastward revolution around the Earth causes its shadow to move from west to east during a solar eclipse.

The moon is slowly contracting as its interior cools, creating moonquakes and lobate scarps—cliffs that are steep on one side and gently sloping on the other—as the moon's surface buckles.

How the moon moves, an interactive lesson

The moon's gravity exerts an overall pressure that displaces the oceans toward the opposite sides of Earth's equator, producing tides.

Geological tremors on the moon provide evidence that it is shrinking

The Earth would tear apart the moon if it were less than one-twelfth its current distance from the planet.

There are places on Earth where the moon never sets and others where it never rises for days at a time throughout the year.

Although the moon passes between the sun and Earth each month, its orbit is tilted by five degrees, preventing Earth from experiencing a solar eclipse each month.

How the moon creates tides

Earth's smooth, continuous motion as it orbits the sun prevents detectable motion

You could fit every planet in the solar system in the space between the Earth and the moon when they are farthest apart.

Simulate the precession of Mercury's perihelion—the gradual shift in the closest point of Mercury's path around the sun as its elliptical orbit rotates.

Moon 101: NASA's complete overview of our lunar companion

In the third century BCE, the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos estimated the distance to the moon using geometry after measuring the length of Earth's shadow during a lunar eclipse.

Earth's rotation rate constantly changes, which drove the need for leap seconds to synchronize a solar day with timekeeping tools.

Rising sea levels due to climate change may be slowing Earth's rotation

Changes in Earth's orbital cycles influence the timing of ice ages

Explaining why the Earth wobbles

Satellites in low Earth orbit can experience changes in their orbits due to shifts in solar activity, which alter the amount of energy Earth's atmosphere receives and its resulting density.

Because it loses more atmospheric gas to outer space than the cosmic dust it collects as it moves through space, the Earth loses about 50,000 metric tons of mass every year.

Mar's moons, Phobos and Deimos, are thought to be captured asteroids

Every eclipse is preceded or followed by another eclipse, separated by about two weeks and alternating between solar and lunar types.

Just as the moon deforms the Earth to create tides, Jupiter deforms its moon, Io, generating the thermal energy in Io's interior that powers the more than 400 volcanoes on its surface.

Over thousands of years, the frequency of solar eclipses is greatest around the Arctic and Antarctic Circles and lowest near the equator.

While the leading hypothesis for the moon's origin involves a Mars-sized object called Theia striking ancient Earth and forming from the resulting debris, it cannot explain why lunar isotope abundances match Earth.

Why the edge of Earth's atmosphere varies depending on which property is considered

Earth's core is about 2.5 years younger than its surface according to relativity

Explore how far you've traveled through space while living on Earth

Where you are located in a gravitational field affects how quickly you age

If the Earth stopped spinning, about 85% of the world's population would experience supersonic winds.

Our brains trick us into seeing an enlarged Moon when on the horizon

The sun does not just get lower or higher in the sky throughout the year—it traces a figure-eight pattern called the analemma.

Solar eclipses are a cosmic coincidence because the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun but about 400 times closer to Earth, allowing it to block sunlight for those on Earth within its shadow.

Atmospheric greenhouse gases trap thermal energy and make Earth habitable

In the summer months, the Eiffel Tower grows a few millimeters and leans slightly to one side because sunlight warms the metal, causing it to expand.

If there were a swimming pool on the moon, where gravity is about one-sixth that of Earth, championship finswimmers could potentially launch themselves up to 5 meters (16 feet) in the air.

Watch a visualization of what it would look like to move along Earth's surface as fast as the International Space Station, or about 23 times the speed of sound.

Some maps may incorrectly identify the boundaries of a solar eclipse's totality because they assume the Earth is a smooth surface.

GPS satellites would become significantly inaccurate within hours if they didn't recalibrate according to Einstein's theories of relativity.

Craters found on the moon and the calculated dates of these impacts, based on rocks returned by the Apollo missions, suggest that Earth was pummeled by asteroids for millions of years—a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.

Differences in the tilts of planetary orbits make perfect alignment impossible

The geoid depicts what Earth would look like if not for tides and currents, given the planet's rotation and uneven gravitational field.

Atmospheric drag is causing the Hubble Space Telescope to drift toward Earth slowly

Blood moons only occur during total lunar eclipses, when the Earth blocks the sun, but its atmosphere lets redder parts of sunlight through to reflect off the lunar surface.

While the sun's gravity keeps the planets in orbit, their gravity also pulls on the sun, causing it and everything else in the solar system to orbit around a mutual balance point called the barycenter—the true center of the solar system.

The crew of Artemis II captured a photograph of Earth setting as they orbited the moon

Explore a collection of moon interactives from NASA, including a 3D lunar surface explorer, a tool for classifying moon rocks, and an interactive map for observing the moon each day of the year.

The underlying fabric of the universe—spacetime—changes shape in the presence of mass and energy, which affects measurements of space and time.

Leap smears evenly distribute leap seconds, which were used to resynchronize clocks with Earth's rotation, over a 24-hour period.