More than 50 years after humans first orbited the Moon, the Artemis astronauts will repeat the feat on Monday, using the most basic instrument to study it: their eyes.
Despite the technological advances since the Apollo missions, Nasa still relies on the vision of its astronauts to learn more about the Moon.
“The human eye is basically the best camera that ever could or ever will exist,” said Kelsey Young, the lead scientist for the Artemis 2 mission. AFP.
“The number of receptors in the human eye far outweighs what a camera is capable of.”
While modern cameras may be superior to human vision in some respects, “the human eye is really good at color, and it’s really good at context, and it’s also really good at photometric observations,” Young said.
Humans can understand how lighting changes surface detail, like how angled lighting reveals texture but reduces visible color.
In just an instant, humans can detect a subtle color shift and understand how lighting changes the contours of a landscape like the surface of the Moon, details that are scientifically useful but difficult to discern from photos or videos.
Artemis 2 astronaut Victor Glover, piloting the Orion spacecraft, said before liftoff this week that eyes were a “magical instrument.”
Field researchers
To ensure they made the most of their proximity to the Moon, the four Artemis 2 crew members underwent more than two years of training.
Young said the goal was to turn the astronauts into “field scientists” through a combination of classroom instruction, geological expeditions to Iceland and Canada and several simulated flybys of the Moon, just like the mission they’re on.
The three American astronauts – Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Glover and Mission Specialist Christina Koch – along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen all had to memorize the Moon’s “Big 15”, or the 15 features of the Moon that will allow them to orient themselves.
Using an inflatable lunar globe, they practiced seeing how the angle of the sun changed the colors and textures of the moon’s surface, improving their observation and note-taking skills for the big moment.
“I can tell you, they’re excited and they’re ready,” Young said with a smile.
‘About the size of a basketball’
The Artemis astronauts’ mission is to study certain lunar sites and phenomena as part of 10 targets selected by Nasa and ranked in order of priority based on scientific interest.
During the flyby of the Moon, which will last several hours, the crew will observe the celestial body with their naked eyes along with cameras they have on board.
This was told by Noah Petro, head of NASA’s Planetary Geology Laboratory AFP that the Moon will look to the astronauts “about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length.”
“The question I’m most interested in is whether they will be able to see color on the surface of the moon,” Petro said.
“I don’t mean rainbow colors, but you know, dark brown or tan colors because that tells us something about the composition and it tells us something about the history of the Moon.”
David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute told AFP he doesn’t expect any earth-shattering discoveries because of the many lunar probes and high-resolution images of the Moon taken since the Apollo missions.
Nevertheless, “to have astronauts describe what they see… It’s an incident that at least two generations of people on Earth have never heard before,” he said.
The Artemis 2 flyby will be broadcast live by Nasa, except for a period when the spacecraft is behind the moon.
“Just listening to their practice descriptions in the mission simulations… It brings chills up my arms,” Young said.
“I’m absolutely convinced that these four people are going to deliver some incredible descriptions.”
