NASA's Grail Probe Returns 1st Video Moon's Far Side

摘要

A gravity-mapping spacecraft orbiting the Moon has beamed home its first video of the lunar far side - a view people on Earth never see. The new video was captured by Ebb, one of NASA's twin Grail probes, using a novel camera called MoonKAM, which will eventually be used by schoolchildren to snap photos of the lunar surface as part of an educational project. The two spacecraft have been circling the Moon since they arrived in orbit over the New Year. "The quality of the video is excellent and should energize our MoonKAM students as they prepare to explore the moon," said Maria Zuber, Grail principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, in a statement accompanying the video's Feb. 1 release. Because the Moon is tidally locked with Earth, it presents only one face, known as the near side, to the planet's surface. The side of the moon that faces away from Earth is the far side. Only robotic spacecraft and Apollo astronauts who orbited the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s have seen the far side of the Moon directly.