Thermal Pictures of the Dark Side of the Moon Emerge
8th October 2009
Okay, this’ll really get you. You may have heard that, this week, the United States is planning to–get this–bomb the moon. They’re doing this in an effort to look for water or ice deposits that future lunar colonies can use, and to that end, the first ever thermographic camera images of the moon have been released.
The really strange thing about this is how uniform the temperature bands are back there. You can see how the bands start hot near the top and work their way to cold at the bottom. I suppose that makes some sense thanks to thermal radiation and all–the narrower part near the top has less density than the thick part at the middle–but this clear delineation is still pretty striking.
It’s just so incredibly even. But regardless, this definitely makes for a really cool picture from space, with a little help from the thermographic camera.