If the Moon Were as Close to the Earth as the ISS, We’d Be in Big Trouble [Video]

Fun fact: the ISS is actually way closer to the Earth than you’d think it would be. Like, only about 240 miles. That’s basically less than a three and a half hour drive on your standard highway road in the U.S. Which is fine, because as far as space objects go, the ISS is pretty small. But what if the Moon were traveling at that distance instead?

In another video from Nick of yeti dynamics, the guy who recently decided to send Saturn zooming past the Earth on the way to the Sun, the Moon gets real up-close and personal with the planet around which it orbits, closing in the distance from 384, 400 km to 420 km. The end result looks pretty spectacular, but the added pull of Moon’s gravity on Earth would probably doom us all. Says Bad Astronomer Phil Plait:

Of course, the Moon doesn’t get out of this unscathed either—it gets ripped apart into little tiny pieces and stretched out to become a debris-filled ring, like the ones circling Saturn. “That would be cool to see, too, except for the whole everyone being dead thing,” Plait adds. Oh, well. That’s what hypothetical scientific models on YouTube are for, right?

(via Laughing Squid)

Meanwhile in related links

• Saturn recently got the same video treatment
• Why is Jupiter’s Red Spot disappearing?
• The first Story Time in space is live