Planning your photo ops for a trip around the moon
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What unique role does Dr. Kelsey Young play in the Artemis II mission?
Hey, it's Flora, and you are listening to Science Friday. When astronauts are in orbit, most of the messages from Earth come from a person in a role called CAPCOM. They're often an experienced astronaut serving as the capsule communicator. But sometimes during the recent lunar flyby of Artemis II, the conversations for mission control came from another desk, one labeled science. If you tuned into the live stream during the lunar flyby, like we did, obviously, you probably saw my next guest seated or sometimes excitedly standing at that desk in mission control. Dr. Kelsey Young is the Artemis Science Flight Operations Lead for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, and she headed up the Lunar Science Observations and Photography for the Artemis II mission.
Hey, Kelsey, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. You can't see me, but I'm smiling ear to ear right now. Have you come down to earth yet?
I will be honest. I'm a big post-processor. So I don't think I've quite gotten enough space from the experience to truly process things. But I can tell you that things have not died down. We're working on processing all the data that we got from Artemis 2 while also looking to the future and starting planning for Artemis 3 and 4.
Yeah, give me a sense of the scale of the data. Like, is it just images? And how much do you still have to process?
Oh, my gosh, there is so much data. And I mean that in the best possible way. We do have four different types of data. We do have the crew images, of course, that's by far the largest data set, as you might imagine. We also have a few crew annotations. So they had the ability on their crew tablets to like literally, you know, with a stylus, like annotate on pictures of the moon to say, I saw this here. And then there were photos and videos taken with the vehicle mounted cameras outside of the, you know, the crew cabin. We also have crew audio files, which is a data set that is just rich with science return. And we're so excited now that we've started to dive into those. We also have- Wait, like voice memos, Kelsey?
Like what are they? Yeah, like literally voice memos. And that was actually our highest priority data set for the mission for lunar science because of the unique mission profile of having human beings looking at the moon from the vantage point that they did have it and actually giving their, you know, nuanced color observations, albedo observations, lighting observations, and all of those data are contained in those audio files.
Why are the verbal observations so important? I mean, do the astronauts' perception of what they're seeing tell us something different from just a raw image from a DSLR camera?
So cameras are really amazing. They take pictures that are so incredibly valuable scientifically. Human eyes are able to provide something on top of that, though. They have the ability, human eyes, to see just in the literal blink of an eye to really capture color nuance. that images you might have to, you know, really understand what's there to pull out. And so an example of that would be, of course, Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmidt describing the orange soil discovery on one of his spacewalks during the mission. And he saw this, you know, you hear it in his voice. He's like, orange soil. Oh, my gosh. And he ultimately collected that sample because he saw that color nuance and took that sample back.
And it ultimately that sample was helped us understand something about how recently volcanic activity existed on the moon which is which was a new you know scientific discovery but when you look at the pictures from his suit mounted camera that orange does not pop out so it's it's not perception it's reality and we worked with them to really hone their toolkit for how to give descriptions so that we could understand what they were seeing it's something that orbiting spacecrafts are not able to provide and It can help the next orbiting spacecraft by saying, hey, crew observed these things in these areas. Hey, science community, is this a value?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What unique role does Dr. Kelsey Young play in the Artemis II mission?
0:03–5:10
2
How did the Artemis II crew prepare for their photo documentation?
5:10–6:30
3
What types of data were collected during the Artemis II mission?
6:30–10:12
4
Why are astronauts' verbal observations valuable for lunar science?
10:12–16:16
5
How was the shot list for lunar photography determined?
16:16–19:22
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Science Friday
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