Artemis 2 Astronauts Will Study the Moon With Naked Eyes
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- NASA's Artemis 2 crew will study the moon's surface mainly with the naked eye during a flyby launching Monday, with mission lead scientist Kelsey Young calling "the human eye is basically the best camera that could ever or will ever exist" because of its superiority in color, context, and photometric observation.
- Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen spent more than two years training as "field scientists," including geological expeditions to Iceland and Canada and memorizing the moon's "Big 15" navigational features using an inflatable moon globe.
- NASA's 10 prioritized scientific objectives for the flyby focus on observing specific lunar sites and phenomena, with Noah Petro, head of NASA's planetary geology lab, most eager to learn whether the crew can detect subtle color variations like dark browns or tans that hint at surface composition.
- Petro told AFP the moon will appear to the crew "about the size of a basketball held at arm's length," giving them several hours of observation time using both naked eyes and onboard cameras.
- David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute said he does not expect major discoveries given decades of probe data and high-resolution imaging, but noted that astronaut descriptions of the moon represent something "at least two generations of people on Earth have never heard before."
- NASA will broadcast the flyby live, with a blackout period when the Orion spacecraft passes behind the moon.
Why it matters: More than 50 years after Apollo, this is the first crewed lunar flyby, and scientists are specifically betting that human eyes will catch subtle color and texture details that automated cameras miss — data that could inform composition analysis and future Artemis landing site selection. The experiment also tests whether trained astronaut-observer descriptions can still add scientific value in an era of high-resolution orbital imagery.
