NASA is looking for help with a problem most of us rarely think about: how often the moon gets smacked by space rocks. To better plan for long-term lunar bases, the agency wants citizen scientists to track "impact flashes"—brief bursts of light visible when meteoroids slam into the moon's darkened hemisphere with the force of up to several pounds of dynamite, per Popular Science. While Earth's atmosphere burns up many small meteors, the moon has no such shield; astronomers estimate about 100 ping-pong-ball-size meteoroids hit it daily, with significantly larger rocks arriving roughly every few years.
The Artemis II astronauts were lucky enough to spot impact flashes during their recent trip. And they weren't alone. Back on Earth, citizen scientists were watching through their telescopes at NASA's direction. As NASA explains, "the locations and brightness of flashes observed by different instruments at different locations together can help constrain the nature and origin of the impactors, as well as the craters they form."
If you have at least a 4-inch telescope with automatic tracking and video at 25-30 frames per second, you can help with the ongoing mission, too, by uploading clips to a central database. NASA-funded researchers will sift through the footage to refine impact rates and help design sturdier lunar habitats. In the future, when seismometers are placed on the moon, impact flashes will also be used to determine the sources of moonquakes, which "will help us work out what the moon's interior looks like," says Impact Flash project lead Ben Fernando.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
