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Old 05-March-2008, 03:12 PM
grant hutchison grant hutchison is online now
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Well, that wasn't what I meant about stability, though obviously you wouldn't want to have your inner moon within the parent's Roche limit.
I was thinking that our moon is a fairly massive perturbing influence, and could be expected to disrupt the orbits of objects in nearby orbits. There are some rules of thumb to work out the stable zones, though, which I should be able to dig out.

As for tidal evolution, IIRC, this goes a bit faster around Earth than it does around Mars, because of all that water sloshing around. Again, there are OOM calculations that I should be able to find in the files.

I'm not going to have access to the info until tomorrow, though.

Grant Hutchison
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