Recordings from the Far Side of the Moon

Lea Cheshire (0:00)

Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of NASA's Johnson Space Center, episode 439, Recordings from the Far Side of the Moon. I'm Lea Cheshire, and I'll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts. I'll also let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight and beyond. The crew of Artemis II were the first people to fly around the Far Side of the Moon in more than 50 years. And because of their launch date and the moon's illumination, they were also the first people ever to see certain lunar features on the Far Side of the Moon. This gave our lunar scientists a unique opportunity to gather data from human eyes and voices. While the crew was taking over 10,000 photos, they also recorded voice notes of what they were seeing real time. On this episode, we'll be sharing a few of those recordings with you for the first time. The full collection of crew audio, annotations, and images from the lunar flyby will be released October 7th alongside the Artemis II preliminary lunar science report. To give us some context for what we're hearing today and why it's significant, lunar scientist Juliane Gross, Artemis Curation Lead, and Aaron Regberg, Artemis II lunar science team member, are joining us in the studio to relive flyby day in a brand new way. A quick note before we get started, we will be playing some highlights from the audio the crew recorded. We have done minimal editing to these clips in terms of cleaning up sound quality and noise, but we have combined recordings where the astronauts had a conversation and each side was picked up by a different recorder. Now let's get started.

Ulyana and Aaron, thank you so much for joining us today on Houston We Have a Podcast.

Juliane Gross (1:51)

Thanks for having us.

Lea Cheshire (1:52)

Yeah, thanks. Tell me a little bit about each of you. What are your current positions at NASA?

Juliane Gross (1:58)

Who do you want to start with?

Lea Cheshire (1:59)

You spoke first, so go ahead.

Juliane Gross (2:01)

Okay. I'm the Artemis Sample Curation Lead, and so that means I help NASA to get ready to revisit the Moon with humans on the surface, and then collect rocks and return them back to Earth. And so that means I help get the facility ready on Earth that will receive those samples here at NASA, Johnson Space Center, and Curation. I've developed the Curation Strategy Plan. I work with the Flight Operations Team to develop concepts of operations for sample collection, execution storage, stowage, and then do the recovery, take custody of the samples, and then try to bring them back home to NASA JSC. And then also train the Artemis crew that will be on the surface to how to identify the samples correctly, how to collect them correctly without contamination or contaminating them.

And then once the samples are back here safely, I will do a preliminary examination of the samples, and then publish basically a catalog that everybody in the world can access. And then all the scientists around the globe can use that catalog to write sample requests to get these samples to do their scientific studies on them.

Lea Cheshire (3:12)

So you'll be one of the first people on Earth to see the rocks that they bring back from the Moon.

Juliane Gross (3:18)

That's cool.

Lea Cheshire (3:20)

I love it. Aaron, what about you?

Aaron Regberg (3:21)

I am the Artemis Integration Portfolio Scientist, which is a role that didn't exist until about a year ago. But I'm one of the scientists that's sort of working with all of the engineers that are designing these missions to make sure that we're able to do the science that we want to do when we get to the Moon and when we bring these samples back. So, it's kind of a jack of all trades, master of none position where I spent a lot of time listening to the engineers talk about the vehicles and the tools that they want to design, and trying to think about how that might have impacts on the science that we want to do when we eventually get back to the Moon and trying to document that and give heads up to the other scientists. Like, hey, these are the decisions that are being made.

Is this going to be okay for the idea of the experiment that you have in your head, or do we need to go back to engineers and say, hey, is there a different way we can do this? Is there changes that we can make to allow the experiments that we want to do on the Moon to make sure that the samples that we bring back that Juliane is going to be responsible for are as close to pristine as possible?