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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).


There are error bars on absolutely everything that we ever measure.


Sorry, missed a "large". It would sound pretty strange to me to claim that the distance between New York and London is "an estimated x kilometers" (with single-kilometer precision), even though there is tectonic movement etc.




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