Dante Loretta

This is the far side of the moon.

The moon's tidally locked, so it's always got the same side facing the Earth.

So you never get to see this side unless you send a spacecraft over there and take a picture of it.

And then also the equator is down here, and this is the North Pole.

So you can actually tell that we did that inclination plane change, and we're looking down on the moon from our normal point of view here.

We're also, you know, I talked about looking for life on the Earth, so we had a fourth filter that was the infrared filter on the camera.

So here's the color image, and then it's going to fade back to that infrared image, which we mapped onto the green channel here.

And this is what's called the vegetation index.

So now you can actually see that there might be some life on this planet.

So when you look at it in the visible, it mostly looks like an ocean world, all of rock covered in water.

But one of the coolest things is here.

Anybody know what that is?

That's Hawaii.

The Hawaiian Islands really pop out.

You can see New Zealand.

You can see the coast of Australia.

You can see the jungles of Southeast Asia and the jungles of Mexico over here too.

So very different view of our planet when you change wavelengths and look at it in the infrared.

So here's what the timeline looks like.

We launched, we just did our Earth gravity assist, and then the approach maneuver is in October, a little less than one year from now.