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The gravity anomalies on the moon (generally accepted to be caused by mascons) are powerful enough to affect the orbit of satellites. I'm trying to determine how much effect they would have on a person standing on the surface. If we experience about 17% of Earth's gravity on the lunar surface, how much would that differ within one of these anomalies?

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  • $\begingroup$ If there was a "close" category for inadequate research, I would use it for this question. @JoshDenmark, if I enter the title of your question into a search engine, it's going to find the immediate answer to your question at wikipedia and at other sites. You need to rephrase this question to show what you've already looked at and why those existing answers are not satisfactory to you. $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 11, 2015 at 17:18
  • $\begingroup$ I have googled, quite a bit. Maybe my google-fu isn't as great as others, but all I keep coming up with are the explanations of what a mascon is, how they may be formed, and the effects they have on orbitals. I'm looking for the effect on the ground, to a person standing in the center of one. Now when I google this question, the top returns are myself asking the question... $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 27, 2015 at 15:38
  • $\begingroup$ @DavidHammen The downvote tooltip reads "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful". $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 22, 2016 at 4:25

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Upon some google-ing and wiki-ing I found this image of a gravity map of the moon:

enter image description here

That scale up the top is measured in milli-Gal which is thousandths of a cm/s^2. For scale gravity is ~9.81m/s^2 which equals ~981000mGal. The difference between gravity at sea level and the top of mount everest is 2Gal, or 2000mGal, which is 0.2% of average gravity. On the moon, the variation seems to be about 1000mGal, with the average being 162000mGal, which is about 0.6% of average gravity.

In conclusion, on the surface, there is no noticeable difference. Not to a human anyway.

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