Fair. Its primary motion is around the earth.
I think this is a relative thing. Point of reference. Co-ordinate system. The thing Galileo got in trouble about.
Well, the moon is orbiting the sun, and so is the earth, and they’re doing it together. So it’s pretty straightforward. And if you look at the path of the moon around the sunit doesn’t look like it orbits anything else. So yeah, it’s all relative. We’re just very earth centric.
And “Dodgeball”?
I object.
The gravity of the earth has a bigger effect on the moon than the sun does, and that is why the moon travels around the earth, and not around the sun on its own.
Did you look at the path of the moon around the sun. It doesn’t look like the moon travels around the earth to me.
Check tripolars link. The Moons orbit around the sun is completely convex, there is never any retrograde motion.
Ok to make Chronos happy, lets say the OP was asking about meteors outside the earth-moon double planet system, besides Mars?
How about the moons of Mars? They may not be considered planets by everybody, but let’s leave that aside. I don’t know much about their orbits, but it would seem easier to knock something off those little guys than Mars itself. If they are captured asteroids as believed, meteorites from those moons would be distinctly different from ones from Mars.
Do I get a cookie? The Nobel Peace Prize?
That is pretty neat. I have thought about it all night. Thanks, and ignorance well fought.
Not until you clear your orbit, young gender!
**Tripolar **- do you have that same diagram of any other moons in the solar system? I’d like to see pictures of Ganymede’s orbit, or Phobos and Demos.
Bad Astronomer says the moon orbits the earth, convex path be damned.
Could the same arguments show that the earth doesn’t orbit the sun, but rather galactic centre? Or is that completely different?
TriPolar, it would be relatively easy to knock something off of Phobos or Deimos (you could almost jump off of them), but the catch is that they’re so small, that they wouldn’t be able to contribute very much material, so we’re unlikely to ever find anything from them. And once you’re asking about material knocked off of them, you might as well also ask about material knocked off of all the other random piddly little asteroids, as opposed to just the big ones like Ceres and Vesta. Plus, even if you can say that a particular meteor was knocked off of some asteroid-like object (rather a common situation), I don’t think that there’s any way you could narrow it down to Phobos or Deimos specifically.
I haven’t found any pictures that make it clear. I did rough calculations to see that the moon wouldn’t be crossing it’s own path, then found the confirmation on line. It’s easy to calculate because the earth and moon’s orbital periods match up with conventional time measures.
When you take gravity into account (which I suppose is what celestial orbits are really about) then I can’t tell you much. But in spatial terms, the compounded movements of rotating objects get interesting. It’s easy in our minds to simplify the motion into simple circles, but mapped out over time and space it’s a lot more complex. When you add gravity as a factor the math gets too tough for me. Damn universe is laid out worse than the streets in DC. It should have been a grid instead of all this spacetime geodesic gravity well stuff. Who wrote the specs for this thing anyway?
Actually I ended up going into the post from the other direction. I was wondering how you could tell if an alleged Martian meteorite didn’t come from Phobos or Deimos. But I recalled how they’re believed to be captured asteroids, so they would be different. Our moon might be made largely out of Earth so it might be difficult to distinquish an Earth meteorite on Mars from one that comes from our Moon. But yes, like any other fragment of rock out there that we don’t know much about, we probably don’t know if it came from a Martian moon. I don’t know if we could identify metorites from our moon because they could be so similar to Earth rocks. And even the ones we think are from Mars still could have come from somewhere else. As I said in the previous post, it’s just bad design. Every rock should have included taggants to identify it’s origin.
Not to hijack the hijack 
but would any of you guys know the answer to this related question I asked up thread?
My guess is no. Nuclear explosions send a lot of tiny stuff up in the air, but not that much in the way of chunks since those tend to vaporize.
The Operation Plumbbob manhole cover probably did not leave the atmosphere, despite being estimated to be initially moving at well over escape speed. And if it didn’t, I doubt anything else ever has, either.
And there’s very little difference in the energy required to reach the Moon or Mars (or beyond): More distant destinations just take longer. So it doesn’t much matter whether we consider the Moon a planet, for this question.
What the hell is a “balloon shot”?