When Pink Floyd sang about meeting you on the dark side of the moon, they didn’t realize the far side of the moon isn’t so dark.
This new video from NASA’ Goddard Science Page shows an alien landscape, related to what we are used to seeing as “the moon”, yet so very different down to the smallest detail.
The official text on the NASA Goddard Facebook page is as follows:
The far side of the moon, like the side we can see from Earth, goes through a complete cycle of phases. But unlike the side we can see, the terrain of the far side is quite different. Learn more: http://go.nasa.gov/1KcDj1C & www.nasa.gov/lro
The far side of the moon lacks the large dark spots, called maria, that make up the familiar Man in the Moon on the near side. Instead, craters of all sizes crowd together over the entire far side. The far side is also home to one of the largest and oldest impact features in the solar system, the South Pole-Aitken basin, visible here as a slightly darker bruise covering the bottom third of the disk.
The far side was first seen in a handful of grainy images returned by the Soviet Luna 3 probe, which swung around the Moon in October, 1959. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, was launched fifty years later, and since then it has returned hundreds of terabytes of data, allowing LRO scientists to create extremely detailed and accurate maps of the far side. Those maps were used to create the imagery seen here.
More on the NASA Goddard Facebook page found HERE