More than 50 years after humans first flew around the Moon, Artemis astronauts will repeat the feat on Monday and use the most basic instrument to study it: their eyes.

Washington (United States) (AFP) – More than 50 years after humans first flew around the Moon, Artemis astronauts will repeat the feat on Monday and use the most basic instrument to study it: their eyes.

Despite the technological advancements since the Apollo missions, NASA still relies on the eyesight of its astronauts to learn more about the Moon.

“The human eye is basically the best camera that could ever or will ever exist,” Kelsey Young, the lead scientist for the Artemis 2 mission, told AFP.

“The number of receptors in the human eye far outweighs what a camera is able to do.”

Although modern cameras may be superior to human eyesight in some respects, “the human eye is really good at color, and it’s really good at context, and it’s also really good at photometric observations,” Young said.

Humans can understand how lighting changes surface details, like how angled lighting reveals texture but reduces visible color.

In just the blink of an eye, humans can detect a subtle color shift and understand how lighting changes the contours of a landscape like the Moon’s surface, details which are scientifically useful but difficult to ascertain from photos or videos.

Artemis 2 astronaut Victor Glover, who pilots the Orion spacecraft, said before liftoff this week that eyes were a “magical instrument.”

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  • inari@piefed.zipEnglish
    56·
    3 days ago

    The human eye is basically the best camera that could ever or will ever exist

    I’m no scientist but this sounds extremely incorrect

      • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        2 days ago

        “Best camera ever” just sounds like a conservatives excuse for not funding proper science.

        They probably could have done something special with modern satellite imaging/radar systems if they actually had the funding for it, but they had to fight for decades to get the funding to even do this.

        Meanwhile America spends hundreds of billions every year — now trillions — so the Epstein class can bomb peasants and fund both a surveillance state and secret police that enable them to rape kids.

    • VicksVaporBBQrub@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      Human eye pros:

      • sensitive to greens in low light.
      • sensitive to pickup tones and textures whereas a computer may detect solid colors.

      Human eye cons:

      • no infrared, but just maybe a tiny tiny bit.
      • no ultraviolet.
      • no radiation types, except in specific extremes of certain types like cosmic rays.

      Yeah that was a nonscientific sentence they said.

  • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.orgEnglish
    191·
    2 days ago

    Look, NASA. I get that you need to do a test run before you can land on the moon.
    Stop trying to pretend this is some important scientific mission. It’s not. It’s engineering.
    I actually had to stop watching the live stream a couple hours before the launch, from the cringe.

    “Oh yeah, we will do so much science! Like launching those little cube sats…and looking at the moon…”
    “Oh wow, incredible, all that science!”
    “Also, you can learn a lot from looking at the astronauts’ saliva.”
    “umm, yeah”
    “Yeah, we’ll get a lot of awesome science from this mission!”