alt Hacker NewsIt’s an irregularly shaped body so there’s not one single radius. Mean radius is always going to be an approximation (even for Earth); the mean radius of the Moon is 1,737.4 km.
It’s an irregularly shaped body so there’s not one single radius. Mean radius is always going to be an approximation (even for Earth); the mean radius of the Moon is 1,737.4 km.
But it's still an approximation, not an estimate, right? (The fact that you can list the mean radius with sub-decimal precision suggests as much.)
To me, an estimate suggests that there's error bars; an approximation suggests that there's variance that we can quantify (or at least we're very confident about our error bars).