GRAIL Probes Shoot the First Movie of the Dark Side of the Moon
South Pole on the Dark Side South pole of the far side of the moon as seen from the GRAIL mission's Ebb spacecraft. NASA/JPL-Caltech A camera on board NASA's gravity-mapping moon probes captured its first view of the dark side of the moon, a collection of images as part of a camera test in January. The clip serves as a prelude to the GRAIL probes' secondary mission, which will allow schoolchildren to control its cameras and snap pictures of moon features. In the video, the north pole is visible at the top of the screen as the spacecraft flies south. About a third of the way down the moon you see Mare Orientale, a 560-mile-wide impact basin that stretches over the moon's near and far sides. The clip fades out just north of the lunar south pole, according to NASA. The star-shaped formation in the middle of that crater, Drygalski crater, is...