Nasa films far side of the Moon for first time with ‘children’s spacecraft’

The far side of the Moon has been filmed for the first time by a Nasa spacecraft that US schoolchildren will in the future be able to indirectly control.

South pole of the far side of the Moon as seen from the Grail mission’s Ebb spacecraft (Picture: Nasa)

A camera on-board Nasa’s twin gravity recovery and interior laboratory (Grail) lunar spacecraft beamed back images taken on January 19 from the side of the moon that is not visible from Earth.Grail, which consists of two identical spacecraft named Ebb and Flow, is part of the MoonKam (or Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) project that gives schoolchildren in the US the opportunity to select which lunar images should be studied.In the 30-second video the north pole of the Moon is visible at the top of the screen as the spacecraft flies towards the lunar south pole.On show in the film is the Mare Orientale, a 560-mile-wide (900km) impact basin that straddles both the Moon’s near and far side.’The far side of the Moon is extremely rugged,’ Maria Zuber, Grail principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (MIT), said. ‘The surface also contains many impact craters which are preserved features from asteroids that hit the Moon’s surface after it formed.’The MoonKAM investigation will begin in March when middle students will have the opportunity to target interesting areas of the Moon that they want to study.’She added: ‘The quality of the video is excellent and should energise our MoonKAM students as they prepare to explore the moon.’

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