On October 9, 2026, NASA released video of the Artemis II crew describing impact flashes near the Moon — the crew’s own account of watching meteoroids strike the lunar far side during their flight’s communications blackout. Watch the official NASA video below.
Video credit: NASA / NASA Science via its official YouTube channel. Embedded only; no footage was downloaded or re-uploaded.
The phenomenon the crew describes is one ground-based astronomy knows only from the near side. Without an atmosphere to burn them up, debris grains strike the Moon at tens of kilometres per second and vaporise in flashes of light; telescopes on Earth log these on the darkened near side, but the far side — turned permanently away — can only be reported by people or instruments in lunar orbit. As GlobeNews9 reported in its companion coverage, the astronauts paired their sightings with photographs, drawings and annotations, converting impressions into a record researchers can analyse: brightness, duration and position are the raw materials from which an impactor’s size and speed are estimated.
Hearing the crew narrate it matters for a reason beyond colour. Their judgements — what drew the eye, what a flash looked like against the dark landscape, when they reached for the camera — are themselves data about how human observers perform a task that future lunar missions will assign deliberately, as monitoring for the meteoroid environment that habitats must be shielded against.
From anecdote to dataset
The analysis now under way compares the crew’s reports with the mission’s imagery and with the ground-based flash network’s statistics. GlobeNews9’s Health & Science Desk will follow the published results as NASA and researchers release them.
There is also a simpler payload in the crew’s account: the reminder that for all the instruments now watching the Moon, four pairs of human eyes still noticed things no sensor was aimed at. Exploration keeps justifying its witnesses.
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