On Sunday night, the moon will be full and what is extra special
is that the Earth's shadow will move across the moon.
So we will see a total lunar eclipse and that will be visible across
much of the world.
Here on the East Coast, starting around midnight,
we will be seeing the total eclipse and will last about an hour and a half.
Yeah. I think it's actually
one of the most beautiful things about the lunar eclipse.
So as the earth moves in front of the sun, it's shadow is blocking the sun.
And the only light that gets to the moon's surface
is that light that is passing through the Earth's atmosphere.
And so when you see that sunset or sunrise,
you're getting that kind of beautiful, orange ish reddish glow.
And if you are standing on the moon, that is all that you would see that
orangish reddish glow from all of the sunsets
and all of the sunrises across Earth that are being
projected through the Earth's atmosphere and onto the surface of the moon.
Yeah. So I think one of the most fun things that we're doing to get
ready is we have been imaging the moon and exploring it scientifically
from orbit for the last 13 years from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
And so I work on the camera team.
We've been imaging every square inch of the moon's surface, making sure
that we can find landing sites for the astronauts that are not only safe,
but they're scientifically interesting and they can teach us new things
about the moon when we go and explore there in person
. Yeah. The moon is really, truly beautiful.
And when we're getting these up close images, they actually do look like art.
We've had a couple art shows of images of the moon,
but they're not just beautiful,
even though I think that's one of the wonderful things about them.
They're teaching us so much about the scientific processes
that we can learn about on the moon.
Those include impact cratering.
We're imaging new impact craters that have formed in the last decade on the moon.
We're imaging the volcanic history of the moon.
So even though much of that was occurring billions of years ago,
we can still learn a lot about how the moon's interior evolved,
how all of these eruptions occurred on the moon's surface.
And some of them actually even occurred
even more recently than we would have suspected.
So on the moon, that's like
10 million years ago, but that's still geologically recent.
And when we're talking about a four and a half billion year history.
Yeah. I think one of the
coolest things that we can use the moon to understand
is right here on Earth, because the Earth's history
is the very earliest history on Earth is largely lost.
Earth is so geologically active, it's constantly
reinventing itself through plate tectonics.
It's being eroded with weathering wind.
And so that earliest history is really lost to time.
But on the moon, we can look back in time.
There are craters that are, say,
100 million years old, but they look like they formed yesterday.
And there are craters that are 4 billion years old
that can teach us what was going on in our solar system,
what big, huge impactors were hitting the earth-moon system
right in those times where life was beginning to form on earth
and they can teach us
about the environment on earth because those impacts had huge effects.
They would have vaporized the oceans on Earth and sterilized a lot of the crust.
So understanding what was going on, how Earth was being affected by it,
the space environment
is really one of the critical things that we turn to the moon to understand.
Moon Dot NASA.gov is a fantastic place to go to learn more about the moon
and all of the exciting things that are coming up.
And then you can, of course, look to at NASA's moon on Twitter.