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Four astronauts on NASA's Orion spacecraft continue to send images from their flight around the moon. The photos reveal previously unseen details of the moon's far side. Central Florida Public Media's Brendan Byrne reports.
BRENDAN BYRNE, BYLINE: For around seven hours, Commander Reid Wiseman and the Artemis II crew took geological observations of the moon, snapping thousands of photos.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REID WISEMAN: And we saw sites (ph) - sites that no human has ever seen before, not even in Apollo. And that was amazing for us.
B BYRNE: Those sites - around 35 of them - were picked by lunar scientists led by NASA's Kelsey Young. Along with snapping photos, the crew recorded audio of their observations, using geological terms they learned in training. NASA estimates the crew collected 175 gigabytes of data from the flyby observation.
KELSEY YOUNG: We have a lot of data to get through (laughter).
B BYRNE: And within that data could be answers to questions Young and her team have about the origins of the moon and what it's made of.
YOUNG: This is how we start to really bite away at these really, really fundamental science questions that impact not just our understanding of the moon but how our own planet has evolved over time.
B BYRNE: Just as important as the images are the observations made by the crew. Paul Byrne is a planetary scientist and says while images offer an objective view, what observers see and feel can have just as great of an impact on scientific understanding.
PAUL BYRNE: But it's people's impressions of what they see. And it's also the fact that the eye is such an amazingly sensitive instrument - much more than any camera we have. They did a fantastic job.
B BYRNE: That was demonstrated at Ohm crater, a 38-mile-wide scar in the lunar surface that scientists think was created by something smacking really hard and fast into the moon. They saw rays of different colors, which indicate different materials. Young says that could only be found by looking at it with human eyes.
For Young, a key part of the success of this scientific investigation was the ability for her team to talk with the crew during their mission. Young relayed questions from her team directly to the astronauts while at Mission Control in Houston, and the astronauts could in turn ask questions back.
YOUNG: This is absolutely everything we hoped for by integrating science into flight operations. Science enables exploration, and exploration enables science.
B BYRNE: And NASA will use these findings to help pick sites to study even further - sites astronauts may one day even visit.
For NPR News, I'm Brendan Byrne in Orlando. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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