Watch the Artemis II crew describe, in NASA’s own release, the impact flashes they witnessed from the far side of the Moon — five faint bursts of light, each most likely a rock only inches across striking the surface at thousands of miles per hour, believed to be the faintest ever seen with the unaided eye.
The crew were watching deliberately. Lunar scientists had asked them to look for flashes during the nearly hour-long eclipse behind the Moon, when darkness made the surface a screen for them, and their located, timed reports survived the science team’s checks against cosmic-ray artefacts and spacecraft reflections. In this video they recount the sightings at two points in the story: the moments of observation themselves, and the moment Mission Control’s lunar science team received the news.
Their photographs, observations, drawings and annotations from the flyby are now published with the mission’s full science release, and the counts they made feed the impact-rate estimates that future lunar habitats will be designed against.
Listen, as you watch, for how procedural the wonder is: call-outs, confirmations, clock times. That discipline is what turns a fleeting light into data a habitat designer can use, and it is the authentic sound of exploration — excitement, immediately written down.
Video: NASA (official channel). Embedded from YouTube; no download or re-upload. The crew’s annotated images and the full dataset are available through NASA’s Planetary Data System release of 7 October.
