The far side of the moon, always hidden from human eyes, is a mystery no more, thanks to a new video released by NASA.
Created using mapping data gathered by the space agency's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the video shows the moon's "dark side" is not really always dark but goes through turns of light and dark just like the side that faces us here on Earth.
"Just like the near side, the far side goes through a complete cycle of phases," NASA says. "But the terrain of the far side is quite different. It lacks the large dark spots, called maria, that make up the familiar Man in the Moon on the near side."
The video is made up of images the LRO has been gathering since 2009. Previously, the only images of the moon's far side were a few fuzzy images gathered by a Soviet probe, Luna 3, as it swung behind the moon in 1959.
From the Earth we always and only see one side of the moon because it is tidally locked to our planet, so a view from a spacecraft is our only chance to examine features on the side it keeps hidden from us.
The NASA orbiter, with its precise laser altimeter working in conjunction with its camera, can provide the most detailed images ever of the rugged terrain that forever remains turned away from the Earth.
Although it lacks the dark maria, historically known as lunar "seas," it is covered with craters both big and small, including what is known as the South Pole-Aitken basin, "one of the largest and oldest impact features in the solar system," NASA says.
The LRO is in a polar orbit around the moon, eventually passing over every portion of the lunar surface turning beneath it.
When it launched in 2009, it was NASA's first moon mission in more than 10 years, and is seen by the space agency as paving the way for future manned and robotic missions.
The detailed mapping being created by the $500 million LRO mission, which has returned terabytes of data, is intended to identify safe prospective landing sites for future missions and locate potential resources on the lunar surface.
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio has taken the images obtained and stitched them together to create the video.
