The Moon’s other face
Processed image. Publisher still from EPIC’s 16 July 2015 lunar-transit observation, released 6 August 2015. Sequential red, green and blue exposures are combined; lunar motion between them creates a coloured limb offset. This 1024×576 preview also introduces the matching time-lapse, rather than a separate additional event.
NASA media-use guidelines · factual informational use with attribution; resized to WebP, no endorsement implied
· Original image source · Image licenceWatch the far side cross Earth, then compare its cratered surface with a map of the crust beneath it.
- World
- Moon
- Case date or period
- Archive releases · 1996–2015
Look closer
The far side’s visible appearance differs markedly from the familiar dark plains of the near side. Orbital images reveal the landscape at different scales.
A sunlit far side in motion
EPIC watched the Moon pass across Earth on 16 July 2015. The publisher’s time-lapse follows actual satellite photographs, with hours condensed into a short sequence. Look at the slight green edge: the colour exposures were taken successively, so the moving Moon shifted between channels. That visible offset belongs to the camera’s sampling. The far side is sunlit here, a reminder that its name describes which face points away from Earth.
Follow the evidence
The crustal-thickness product uses gravity measurements and modelling. Its colours represent inferred thickness, not a colour photograph of the ground; compare it with the actual surface images.
Gravity reveals what lava conceals
GRAIL measured small changes in the separation of two orbiters as gravity varied beneath them. Combining gravity with topography let researchers infer crustal density and thickness, including structure hidden under lava-filled basins. Mark Wieczorek’s team revised the estimated average crustal thickness downward. These quantities depend on geophysical interpretation; the colour map is not an underground photograph. A densely cratered surface image and a crustal model describe different aspects of the same Moon.
Similar impacts need not make similar basins
Katarina Miljkovic and colleagues tested how crustal conditions change impact outcomes. Their simulations indicated that the same impactor could make a much larger basin in the hotter, thinner early near-side crust than in cooler far-side crust. GRAIL helped reassess basin sizes partly hidden by lava. This offers a physical explanation for hemispheric differences without assuming that the far side received an entirely different bombardment; basin dimensions are not a simple count of incoming asteroids.
Sources & further reading
- Far Side of the Moon — NASA Image and Video Library / JPL
- Far Side of Moon Imaged by MoonKAM — NASA Image and Video Library / JPL
- Moon Crustal Thickness — NASA Image and Video Library / JPL
- NASA’s GRAIL Creates Most Accurate Moon Gravity Map — NASA / JPL; Mark Wieczorek and GRAIL research team
- NASA’s GRAIL Mission Puts a New Face on the Moon — NASA / JPL; Katarina Miljkovic and colleagues
- From a Million Miles Away, NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth — NASA Scientific Visualization Studio / NOAA · DSCOVR / EPIC
- EPIC lunar transit: capture times and sequential-colour artefacts — NASA Goddard · Rob Gutro / Adam Szabo