Artemis' surprise: the Moon hit by meteorites in real time

During their flight around the Moon, NASA's Artemis II astronauts saw meteorites crashing onto the lunar surface before their eyes, an extremely rare spectacle that arouses the curiosity of scientists.

“These were undoubtedly flashes of impacts on the Moon. And Jeremy (Hansen) has just seen another one,” Commander Reid Wiseman described Monday in full flyby of the star, the first carried out by men in more than half a century.

“Amazing,” responded, as if stunned, the scientific manager of the mission, Kelsey Young, more than 400,000 kilometers below.

“I don't think I expected what the crew would see on this mission, so you probably saw the surprise and shock on my face,” she confided the next day at a press conference.

In the NASA center in Houston, the live description of these flashes of light caused by impacts was greeted with “screams of joy” from scientists, she said.

This phenomenon had in fact been "rarely observed", Jenni Gibbons, reserve astronaut for the Artemis II mission, told AFP on Monday. "The fact that they saw four or five is just remarkable," she noted.

- "No doubt" -

Faced with the interest aroused by these observations, NASA teams questioned the astronauts again on Tuesday about what they had seen. “Were the flashes brief or prolonged? Did you notice a color?” Kelsey Young asked them.

“It was a tiny point of light,” replied Canadian Jeremy Hansen, before adding “I suspect there were many more.”

“I would say they were a millisecond long, like the speed a camera shutter can open and close,” Reid Wiseman described, referring to a “white to bluish-white” appearance.

"For me there was no doubt that we were seeing (an impact), and we were all seeing it," he insisted.

According to NASA's count on Tuesday, the crew reported a total of six meteorite impacts.

Ground teams are now seeking to correlate these observations with data from a satellite orbiting the Moon, said Ms. Young, also specifying that the majority of these observations took place during the solar eclipse witnessed by the crew.

- "Real concern" -

“I am personally surprised” that they “saw so many,” Bruce Betts, chief scientist of the Planetary Society, told AFP.

But "it's very interesting", he adds, because these descriptions of light impacts could allow us to get a better "idea of ​​the frequency of these impacts", he adds.

But also their size. "For this to be able to produce a flash visible to astronauts 6,000 kilometers away (...) it is certainly not a grain of