NASA's 'Apollo TV' program

"Clell Harmon" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 09 Apr 2006 19:56:39 -0500, "Robert J. Kolker"
wrote:

Clell Harmon wrote:


This of course ignores that gravity is not now, and has never
been constant.

Fact? Established when and with what evidence? Why do you suppose the
gravitational constant is not really a constant. Do you have
experimental proof to back that up?


Fact.

Gravitational annomally maping of the planet.


The earth (and any other 'solid' planet) is not homogenous.
Gravity vectors vary all over the planet, to the point where inertial
navigators have to map in the charted annolies to avoid massive local
vertical errors.

Bob Kolker

--
"My God, it's full of stupid!"
You don't understand what the gravitational constant is then. The
gravitational constant is G in

where the "ms" are the two masses, "r" is the distance between them, and F
is the force exerted by gravity. (Note that the masses are considered to be
point masses.) The gravitational anomalies are due to mascons (mass
concentrations) due to, as you pointed out, the fact that planets are not
homogenous, nor are they symmetrical in mass distribution. This doesn't
effect the value of G.