Washington (United States) (AFP) – More than 50 years after humans first flew around the Moon, Artemis astronauts will repeat the feat on Monday and use the most basic instrument to study it: their eyes.
Despite the technological advancements since the Apollo missions, NASA still relies on the eyesight of its astronauts to learn more about the Moon.
“The human eye is basically the best camera that could ever or will ever exist,” Kelsey Young, the lead scientist for the Artemis 2 mission, told AFP.
“The number of receptors in the human eye far outweighs what a camera is able to do.”
Although modern cameras may be superior to human eyesight in some respects, “the human eye is really good at color, and it’s really good at context, and it’s also really good at photometric observations,” Young said.
Humans can understand how lighting changes surface details, like how angled lighting reveals texture but reduces visible color.
In just the blink of an eye, humans can detect a subtle color shift and understand how lighting changes the contours of a landscape like the Moon’s surface, details which are scientifically useful but difficult to ascertain from photos or videos.
Artemis 2 astronaut Victor Glover, who pilots the Orion spacecraft, said before liftoff this week that eyes were a “magical instrument.”
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Best camera ever: has deeply flawed memory system. Sometimes makes things up during processing.
“Best camera ever” just sounds like a conservatives excuse for not funding proper science.
They probably could have done something special with modern satellite imaging/radar systems if they actually had the funding for it, but they had to fight for decades to get the funding to even do this.
Meanwhile America spends hundreds of billions every year — now trillions — so the Epstein class can bomb peasants and fund both a surveillance state and secret police that enable them to rape kids.
We’ve reached Soviet Union levels of propaganda.