00:00Hey space fans! It's Tarek Malik, Editor-in-Chief of Space.com here at
00:04NASA's Johnson Space Center where we're learning all about the Artemis 2
00:07mission and the great science that is going to be done when astronauts fly
00:11around the moon for the first time in like over 53 years since 1972. With me
00:16is Dr. Murray Henderson with a really important job deputy science lead right
00:23for Artemis 2. That sounds like a science officer Mr. Spock kind of thing for
00:28for this mission. Can you tell us what you do? It is a it's an honor it's an
00:32honor to be a lead on this mission and so what I do is a member of I'm one of
00:36the
00:36leads of the science team specifically focused in the planning of the lunar
00:41flyby and also how data comes down during our mission and so we have helped
00:45develop the plan that the astronauts are gonna hopefully see this morning when
00:49they wake up on their computing devices and then go around the moon and make
00:54their observations. Yeah we should probably point out that this is the first time
00:57that human eyes have not just seen the moon but seen certain parts of the moon
01:02I mean there's parts of the poles of the far side that we're gonna see for the
01:05first time. What how do you train astronauts for something that you've
01:09never seen before with human eyes? Thankfully we have a lot of fantastic
01:14orbiter instruments that have been collecting data for us over the last over
01:1810 years with like especially the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and so we've used a
01:22lot of visual images and visualizations to study but I think if you heard them
01:27talk yesterday one of the things they really said was I can see the topography
01:31I can see that this is a three-dimensional planet we've just been looking at
01:34pictures we've been looking at movies and that was just a really spectacular
01:38moment to hear them really take that jump and realize that they're they're
01:44looking at a big rock over there. In terms of science like what are the types of like the
01:49key things that you are hoping and that you've trained these astronauts to look
01:53for what women they've only got about six seven hours of observing time on the
01:58far side so what is your what's your favorite list you know that you like they
02:04said yesterday everyone has their own on there I'm really excited I'm an Oriental
02:09fan not just because it's a really big basin but because of the history of
02:14volcanism inside there so that has that really big mare patch in the middle that
02:18volcanic deposit but there's also another mystery that Oriental holds there's a
02:22ring that sort of surrounds one of its basin rings and so understanding the how
02:27that ring formed there's a couple of different hypotheses and maybe these
02:32observations can actually add to the data we have and provide a unique
02:36perspective. Now the the basin I imagine that's like an impact basin yeah right
02:41something hit the moon yes and we can't see it because it's on the other side of
02:44the moon and this is what these astronauts are going to see is that what you're
02:47saying? Yeah so the impact basin oriental it's right on the near side far side
02:52boundary and so we can see little bits of it sometimes from Earth but we've never
02:56been able to see it and it's the whole thing it's glory and so this is one of the
03:00textbook impact basins we have compared this basin on every rocky planet from
03:05Mercury to Pluto and so it's to finally have human eyes on it and to see like
03:09anything with that unique angled perspective any color differences that
03:14can tell us a lot more about impact history not just on the moon but
03:17potentially across our entire solar system. There are color differences on the
03:21moon I thought it was just all gray. No we have some color differences that really
03:25show up we've this was first talked about a lot in the Apollo missions Jack
03:29Schmidt on Apollo 17 talked about how he could see some blues and some grays in
03:34different parts of Tranquilitatis and Serenitatis and so he talked about that
03:38from orbit and we are actually able to confirm that once you know it took until
03:43the 90s we got a spectrometer up there and all of a sudden that he drew it on a
03:47map and said this is where it looked blue and this is where it looked sort of
03:52browner and that same signature showed up once we got scientific data and so I
03:58think this these observations that we're gonna have from the crew can really you
04:03know might start help us find the next scientific instrument new places and a
04:07brand new understanding of our moon from human eyes. And that's a really good point
04:11how does the observations and the science of the the Artemis astronauts are
04:15doing on this flyby build on what we've learned from Apollo like you know folks
04:20might say oh we've seen the far side but it sounds like you didn't you're not
04:24gonna see it quite like this with these Artemis II astronauts. Yeah so during the
04:27Apollo program the near side of the moon was eliminated because that's where our
04:32crews were landing and so we want to make sure they had a beautiful sunlit
04:36experience as they walked on the surface so that meant if the Sun was on the
04:39near side the far side was not illuminated so even though the command
04:43module pilots stayed in the state in the capsule as the others went to the
04:47surface the far side of the moon was not illuminated so even though humans have
04:51gone over it they haven't been able to see it and so this will be brand new that
04:56they are seeing these parts of the far side because that just didn't happen in a
04:59Apollo. And then because they're farther away I think forty six hundred yeah yeah
05:05in the four thousands. So they're they're far away they can see the poles. Yeah they
05:10can see the poles. The poles are very important because NASA wants to land at the
05:13south pole. We are very excited about seeing the poles because the Apollo
05:19astronauts were so low they only got us a swath of the surface and so being able to
05:24make comparisons to the pools to the equatorial regions especially the color
05:28differences the brightness differences potentially different surface textures
05:32that are more difficult to pull out we might be able to learn a lot more about
05:37sort of the large-scale surface processes that's happening including like these
05:42impact basins that have rays that go across the entire surface we usually have
05:46to take many pictures to collect that whole feature and now we're gonna get to the
05:52crew will look at it just with one with one glance and they'll see the whole thing.
05:56Dr. Hassan I have a lot more questions but I know that your time is really short thank
05:59you so much for walking us through that and I can't wait to see the signs and the
06:03images that come down from these. Me neither I'm so excited.
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