\u201cThe only illumination source on the Moon will be Earthshine, which is a different spectrum,\u201d Deutsch said in a presentation last month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. \u201cHow does that affect the perception of color and tone?\u201d<\/p>\n
The crew members summarized their observations in periodic updates radioed down to Mission Control on Monday. They also recorded more detailed verbal descriptions onboard the spacecraft, and were tasked with making drawings and annotations to go along with their photographs. This data will come back to Earth when Orion returns Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe tell the crew that their verbal descriptions are actually going to be the monumental scientific dataset from this mission, and that\u2019s because, as humans, the crew provides critical perceptual context that just can\u2019t be replicated with robotic sensors,\u201d Deutsch said. \u201cThe crew has perception and spatial awareness and they have the ability to react and to adapt to what they\u2019re seeing in an instant.\u201d<\/p>\n
This quick perception allowed the astronauts to see several brief flashes of light, each lasting a fraction of a second, on the dark side of the Moon. The flashes occurred as tiny fragments of cosmic material, or micrometeoroids, impacted the lunar surface.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a pinprick of light,\u201d Hansen said. \u201cI would suspect there were a lot more of them \u2026 it is just a momentary flash, no color, about the size of a star, and it really only lasts milliseconds, a half a second at most.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was not surprising to Neal. \u201cIt\u2019s a reminder that the surface is continually bombarded, and this is something that we\u2019ve tried to monitor,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Lunar impact flashes are routinely visible through telescopes on Earth. Astronomers were watching the Moon as Artemis II made its close approach Monday, and if scientists can correlate their own observations with those from the astronauts, they can get a better handle on how many impacts are missed by ground-based telescopes. Constraining the number of impact events will be important as engineers design shielding for a future Moon base.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe only illumination source on the Moon will be Earthshine, which is a different spectrum,\u201d Deutsch said in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-370667","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}