Discussion

NASA’s Artemis II Crew Flies Around the Moon (Official Broadcast)

imglorp: Maybe a lunar geologist can weigh in but I'm a little confused about what they're doing right now. They're still approaching and Glover (engineer, not a geologist) is dictating many visual observations of the light side at great length over the radio to the science desk via capcom: rays, albedo, terminator, craters etc. This has been going on for an hour.The tone is almost like no one has ever seen this before and we don't have centuries of telescope data of the light side and 16 years of LRO multispectral, high resolution data from a mapping orbit.It feels a little bit of showmanship on NASA's part, subtext that awkward human verbal descriptions are invaluable and a good reason to send humans.