NASA’s Genest discusses eclipse, moon colonization at Niota event – The Daily Post-Athenian

NIOTA - Talk of eclipse history and possibly living on the moon were highlights from a presentation in Niota Monday afternoon.

Michael Genest, a Niota resident who has worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center, spoke to those gathered at the Niota Solar Eclipse Festival prior to the eclipse totality.

Genest opened his comments talking about references of solar eclipses in history, citing instances such as India in 1400 B.C. and China in 1302 B.C. He then moved into the science behind the eclipse, noting that there's a "plane of the ecliptic" that is "defined by the Earth's orbit around the sun."

"The moon is not exactly in the ecliptic plane," he said. "That's why every time the moon rotates around the sun, we don't get a total eclipse."

He said on Monday there was a "seventy-mile wide swath of totality" in Monday's eclipse.

Genest added that total eclipses are very rare, as the most recent time before Monday that you could see a total eclipse from Tennessee was 1869 and "that time it just clipped the northeastern part of the state."

Seven years from now he said a total eclipse will be viewable from around Illinois and the next time one will be viewable from this area is 2153.

"It's a cosmic coincidence or the fingerprint of God," he said, noting that the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun but is the exact right distance from the sun to make the total eclipse viewable from Earth.

"It's exactly the right size and distance to blot out the sun," he said. "It's a pretty interesting thing."

He noted that Monday's eclipse "came ashore in a little beach town in Oregon" earlier in the day and then reached totality in Niota at 2:32:33 p.m., lasting for two minutes and 38 seconds.

Discussion of the eclipse led Genest to talk about possibly inhabiting the moon and he said that one day it may become the Earth's eighth continent.

"We are right on the verge of returning to the moon," he said. "We're going to go there, stay there and begin using it for different things."

He said right now, the belief exists that there are large amounts of water currently on the moon.

"There's a lot of water ice in comets," he said, noting that many of those comets have made contact with the moon. "That water hasn't had the chance to evaporate and go away."

He said a pair of satellites have confirmed the existence of this water ice on the moon.

Genest also noted that our progress of making it to the moon is being hastened by the entrance of private companies into the goal of reaching the stars.

"Someday, going to the moon will be no harder than going to Antarctica," he noted, adding that it takes about three days to travel to the moon.

As for a timeline for that, he said there could be small habitations on the moon by 2030 and around 100 years from now there could be "full blown lunar colonies."

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NASA's Genest discusses eclipse, moon colonization at Niota event - The Daily Post-Athenian