Golf shot from the moon..

[thebear]

To settle a bet, could anyone tell me if it would be in any way possible for someone to hit a golf ball into orbit around the moon - given a natural and unobstructed tee shot from the moon's surface?

[desertrat]

Not unless you had a very good golf swing. Bearing in mind air resistance a very good golf shot could see the ball going 130mph on Earth. The escape velocity of the moon is around 5300mph. Due to the reduced gravity (and the space suit) I doubt anyone could even get 130mph! It would go a fair old distance though.

[bernardo]

Any projectile being ejected from the surface of the Moon (or any other large spherical quasi-panetoid) would follow an elliptical path of which the centre of the Moon is at one focus, and which is approximated by a parabolic path. The orbit of a body around the Moon would be circular, or otherwise elliptical. Bu the elliptical path of the projectile would pass through the surface of the Moon and would be mostly contained within the Moon, whereas the elliptical orbit of the body would be entirely outside the body of the Moon.

In other words, if you hit a golf ball off the surface of the Moon it would fall back to the surface again.

OR

If you hit it fast enough (i.e. greater than escape velocity), it would whizz out into space and never come back again.

(unless it was found and returned by a helpful alien)

(or an unfriendly alien using it as a weapon)

[bernardo]

paragraph 1 line 2: delete "panetoid", insert "planetoid"

paragraph 3 line 2: after "never come back again" insert "and not go into orbit around the Moon"

[JiZzHardy]

So Basically, the answer is no my two cents JiZz

[Krishnan]

To escape the earth's orbit, a body needs to be shot with a velocity called escape velocity which works out to be 25,000 mph. So the Q boils down to: "Can I hit a golf ball that flies at the escape velocity with a normal golf club.....?