Moon: Watch the “Hidden Side” video in high definition

Here’s the face of the Moon not visible from Earth in a stunning video created thanks to NASA’s LRO probe

Just like the visible side of the Earth, the hidden (non-dark) side of the Moon Completes a cycle of stagesBut the Moon’s surface on the other side is quite different. The large dark spots, called seas, are missing, while craters of all sizes line the entire side, including one of the largest and oldest relict structures in the solar system, Antarctic-Aitken Basin. It can be seen as a slightly darker dot covering the lower third of the disc. The other side was observed for the first time before Soviet Luna 3 probe in October 1959. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) launched fifty years later and has since returned hundreds of terabytes of data, allowing scientists to create highly detailed (high-resolution) and accurate maps of the face invisible from Earth. Here is the video:

Some information on our satellite

Its radius is 1737 km. The width of the Moon is less than a third of the width of the Earth It orbits at an average distance from our planet of 384,400 km. This means that 30 Earth-sized planets could fit between the two celestial bodies. The moon rotates at the same speed as it revolves around the earth (Synchronous rotation): This is why the same hemisphere is always visible. The changing lighting is the reason why, from our point of view, the Moon goes through phases. During a full moon, the half of the lunar sphere that we can see from Earth is complete Illuminated by the sun. A “new moon” occurs when the visible hemisphere is completely in shadow. The Moon completes a complete orbit around the Earth 27 Earth daysAt the same time, the Earth also rotates on its axis as it orbits the Sun: this is why our satellite appears to orbit us every 29 days.

sourceCover image is owned by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio