I worked on a board (a switch, not a router) with a chip that could saturate all 10 of its GigE ports all day long if you stayed in the fabric. But if you had to pass anything over to the built-in single-core 250 MHz CPU, you were in for a bad time. (Thankfully it also had pins for wiring up your own external CPU.)

Moons get tidally locked because they're very close to their planet, so the planet's gravity is by far the strongest influence.

The planets have much more complicated gravitational interactions because in addition to the Sun's gravity, they influence each other. So you end up with things like orbital resonances instead.

A planet that's close to its star and far from other strong gravitational influences will tidally lock to the star.

It's because Earth pulls on the bulge in the Moon created by Earth's gravity.

It has to do with the tides. Except in this case it isn't ocean tides - it's lunar tides. Just as the Moon's gravity creates a bulge in Earth's oceans, Earth's gravity creates a bulge in the material that makes up the moon.

If Earth and the Moon didn't rotate, the bulges would "point" directly at the other body. But with rotation, the tidal bulge is a little bit offset in the direction of rotation. And the Moon used to rotate.

That offset creates a torque. Earth's gravity tries to pull the bulge into perfect alignment. Over time this slows the rotation of the moon until it stopped rotating at all.

(Technically the Moon does rotate, but it does so at the same rate that it orbits Earth. So it doesn't rotate from our perspective.)

This is a new vehicle, and this is a test flight to work out the kinks before attempting a landing. It's exactly the same way Apollo was done. Go read about Apollo 8.

Mostly because there's been very little US activity on the Moon to justify it. Orbiting the Moon can also be a pain - its gravitational field is "lumpy" - but you can manage that by making your orbit bigger (higher). See this paper if you're interested in details as they pertain to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been flying since 2009: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070035736/downloads/20...

China has a lunar comm relay IIRC, to support some surface operations on the far side.

Mostly true. There are some restrictions on images containing NASA logos or NASA employees, for example. https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/

"Uplink" means Earth to spacecraft. Spacecraft to Earth is downlink.

It's possible for both parties in a conflict to be horrible.

I'm seeing your handle all over the page here, and respectfully, I think you'll benefit from logging off for a little while.

I was merely responding to replies directed at me. But that is probably good advice. No opinion was ever changed online. :)

If it isn't Vietnam, there are plenty of other humiliating US losses to pick from.