NASA Is Fascinated by “Flashes” Seen by Artemis II Astronauts

The world was buzzing when NASA successfully launched Artemis II. The ship carried a handful of astronauts into space for a record-breaking mission that took them behind the moon, officially flying humans to the furthest point they've ever reached before.

While the four astronauts were there, they collected a massive amount of data to bring back home, including photos, videos, and documentation of their observations during the 10-day-long trip around the back side of the moon.

All that information took a while to dig through, and NASA experts have been sharing as much as the agency can as they go through it, offering us a glimpse of new photos and insights from the exciting mission.

However, one of the more surprising revelations has been about the lunar impact flashes that the Artemis II crew reported to NASA. You can learn more about the flashes, what caused them, and why there doesn't appear to be any documentation of them in the photos from the crew below.

According to Space.com, the crew came home with quite a few exciting stories to tell. One of them included getting to watch multiple impact flashes, which the publication describes as the light that is created when a meteorite crashes into the surface of the moon, vaporizing on impact.

It looks like experts were able to pinpoint the location of the impact flashes to the far side of the moon, which is the side that we cannot see from Earth, which includes about half the moon's surface.

And we shouldn't expect to get a chance to see the lunar flashes for ourselves, even though the Artemis crew says they saw several impacts. That's because they are incredibly hard to capture with a camera, which means only the Artemis team was able to witness them.

Since they all took place on the far side of the moon, people shouldn't expect to be able to figure out which new craters were created by these impacts without help from the NASA team analyzing all the data collected in space.

NASA has declared the Artemis II mission a success.

A press statement about the mission lauds the crew for their record-breaking trip to the moon for being the first time that America has sent a crew that close to the Earth's satellite in more than 50 years.

The goal of the mission was to test space technology and tools ahead of the country's plan to create a permanent settlement on the moon. The Artemis II crew was tasked with verifying that communication and other tools would work that far away.

"Artemis II science will pave the way for future missions to the Moon’s surface by helping advance mission operations and training astronauts to use well-informed judgment to identify areas of high interest for science and exploration," the statement read.

While it will still be a while before humans have a base camp up there, it truly does feel like Artemis II's mission was the first big step in humans' giant leap towards further space exploration.