NASA has released a screenshot from an Artemis II astronaut's tablet. On it, three crew members marked in colored ink the spots where they saw tiny rocks hitting the Moon during a solar eclipse on April 6. It shows people working as scientific instruments.
The image shows a simulated view of the dark Moon covering the Sun. Reid Wiseman marked in blue, Victor Glover in green and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen in red. One of Wiseman's notes says three flashes came "roughly 10 min into eclipse". NASA says the team also circled several sightings that were probably the same impact, seen by different people at slightly different times.
Five flashes, after the overlaps were sorted out
That overlap matters. Once the duplicates were removed and other explanations ruled out, NASA settled on five confirmed flashes. Each was an extremely faint "pinprick" of light, seen from about 46,000 miles (74,000 km) away. Before confirming them, the science team ruled out cosmic rays and reflections off the Orion spacecraft. NASA estimates the rocks were no more than a couple of inches (about 5 cm) across. They hit at thousands of miles per hour, which made them bright enough to see without a telescope.
The eclipse made the sightings possible. For 54 minutes the Moon blocked the Sun and the crew had dark conditions for spotting faint light. The flashes lasted less than a tenth of a second, so none of them turned up in the astronauts' photos, according to Sky & Telescope. NASA says counting impacts like these helps estimate how often the surface gets hit, and that feeds into how future lunar habitats and equipment are protected.
Five flashes is a small count, but it covers a size range that's hard to study any other way. MIT planetary scientist Benjamin Weiss, who isn't part of NASA, told Sky & Telescope that observations like these fill "the intermediate range that's not probed by crater observations, either from samples or from orbital images".
The rest of the data dump
The screenshot is one piece of a much larger release, which NASA published on October 7, six months after the flyby. NASA put more than 800 gigabytes of data into its Planetary Data System: over 11,000 full-resolution images and videos, about 8.5 hours of audio of the crew's observations, a preliminary science report and a user guide. NASA calls it the first planetary science dataset gathered mainly by humans in more than 50 years, since Apollo.
One small detail stands out. The mission had four astronauts, but only three ink colors appear. Christina Koch's notes aren't on this screenshot, and NASA's caption doesn't say why.
Anyone can download the archive now. Next comes the check from the ground. During the flyby, amateur astronomers in the NASA-funded Impact Flash project, led by Los Alamos planetary scientist Ben Fernando, filmed the Moon through their own telescopes. Fernando says flashes recorded by different instruments in different places "can help constrain the nature and origin of the impactors".
Sources
- 1.Artemis II Crew Moon Photo Annotations · NASA
- 2.NASA Releases Artemis II Lunar Science Data, Images · NASA
- 3.Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report · NASA Science
- 4.What Were the Flashes That Artemis 2 Astronauts Saw? · Sky & Telescope
- 5.Volunteers Help NASA Astronauts Record Lunar Flashes · NASA Science
Reported by the WattsUpNext desk from the sources linked below. Spot an error? Tell us at corrections@wattsupnext.com.
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