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The dark side of the moon has been a mystery for all researchers, scientists and even artists that found this metaphor very convincing in a lot of their creations. But now, the dark side of the Moon has been revealed.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has brought new data to the NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio,which has produced a simulation of that beautiful side that we never got to see. Human kind has always admired only the same face of the Moon since forever, no matter how much it waxes and wanes through all its phases every years. This certain fact is for us as frustrating as it was for those in Paleolithic and those in the Egyptian empire. The other side has always been just a guess, just a romantic or maybe macabre presumption. But today, the questions might have to stop, thanks to NASA and its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. How would the lunar fazes look like? The video is out on the Internet and even if it is only one minute and 54 seconds long, it has summed thousands of views already. At the moment, there are exactly 824.736 views. The dance and the whirl of the planets of the solar system around the Moon is spectacular. Since 2099, the Orbiter has made pictures on the surface of the Moon, in order to make this experiment possible.
The rotation of the Moon is impossible to be seen from Earth, but it does move, once every 27 days, just the same amount of days in which the Moon orbits the Earth. This amazing phenomenon is called synchronous rotation. As a result, in a course of an orbit, 59% of the Moon is distinguishable from the Earth. The other 41% of the Moon is the one that it’s called “dark”, even if it gets a lot of light.
The differences between the dark and the light side of the moon are many, but the most important one is the following: less black spots mark the dark side, as compared to the light one. These particular sports are called maria, which is Latin for sea, because researchers once thought that those actually are lunar seas. In fact, they are volcanic plains, but this is a recent discovery. In addition, scrientists observed that the smooth and the dark maria cover 17 percent of the surface of the Moon, and almost all of them are presently visible from Earth.
The black side of the Moon has felt humans discovering its secrets in the year 1959, when the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 spacecraft has been the number one explorer in our galaxy. However, NASA’s thousands of photos of the dark side of the Moon are offering us a completely new vision and hope that we can go on discovering many of the secrets that have been hidden from humanity for ages.
Image Source: DeviantArt
