Moon (Photo : YouTube)
No one has ever seen what the moon looks like on a side that is never visible from earth until a detailed animated video showing this view was released by National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Created by the $500 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, the detailed mapping is designed to find not only safe potential landing sites for future missions but also prospective resources on the lunar surface.
"Just like the near side, the far side goes through a complete cycle of phases," NASA explained. "But the terrain of the far side is quite different. It lacks the large dark spots, called maria, that make up the familiar Man in the Moon on the near side."
According to NASA, the South Pole-Aitken basin is also situated at the far side. The basin is one of the solar system's largest and oldest impact features. It is seen in the video as a faintly darker bruise that covers the bottom third of the disk.
In October 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 probe swung around the Moon and returned with several grainy images that showed the how the far side look like for the first time. Five decades later, LRO was launched and has since returned hundreds of terabytes of data.
With the data, scientists were enabled to create particularly detailed and correct maps of the far side that were used to create the imagery seen in NASA's recently released video.
Using Scientific Visualization Studio, NASA created the animations that enabled people on Earth to have a view of the different side of the moon for the first time. The obtained images are stitched together to create the video, Tech Times reported.
Watch it here:
