Why You Would Weigh Less on the Moon

Probably all of us have seen video pictures of astronauts walking on the moon, bouncing along effortlessly and seeming to float across the moon’s surface with ease. We’ve come to understand that this phenomenon is a result of man’s weight on the lunar surface being only a fraction of what it is on the earth. But why is it that a man’s weight on the moon is only a faction of what it is on earth? To show why this is true, we will apply Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation to make some simple mathematical calculations.

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