Meteoroid flashes on the Moon

56:29>> Those were meteorites that were impacting the moon. It's the first time that we've ever observed meteorites impacting the moon. They can't get that with their camera because it it it takes too long to oh, I saw it, let me adjust the lens and all this stuff, but your eyes looking at that thing, they saw bright flashes. It's the first time that we got visual con- confirmation visual confirmation of meteorites striking the moon. And these things are going at like 20 km per second because there's no atmosphere to slow them down. >> going to ask you, is part of the reason they are making contact with the surface there's no atmosphere? >> Yeah, these are tiny tiny little things, but because they're going so fast, they're going to pulverize whatever rock. There's going to be a lot of heat and a brief amount of plasma that's

57:11going to form and that's going to release a lot of light and you can actually see that, right? So, they were seeing these flashes. Now, that's huge scientific value because, you know, if we're trying to build something on the moon >> Right. >> like a permanent base, we need to know what's the frequency of these guys and we have never observed them before. So, now we've got some rudimentary ballpark number. Okay, six in the time at least six in the time that they were on the far side when it was completely dark and they could see these flashes. >> So so we're going to need a meteor defense force. >> Yeah. >> An MDF. >> Yeah, or at least like yeah, at least like whatever habitat we build has to be able to withstand these really high impact high velocity >> tiny particles

57:51>> these observations the idea is you can even though it wasn't from a sensor an instrument sensor versus a human sensor we can still quantificate on velocity and such that we can make those preparations accordingly even if it's not explicit or extremely precise in the measurement quality. The fact that we just were able to do it at all. >> at all >> Now like okay, we need to now need to think about this as an issue. >> Right? The other thing that the human eye is really good at is um color distinction in low light. Okay? In low light cameras are just like it's gray. That's a little bit darker. Humans are able to figure

58:33out distinct vibrant hues so the astronomers the astronauts were reporting orange brown and green colorations. This is a photograph that's highly photoshopped >> Yes. >> to show some of the hues that they were seeing. They had to really sort of constrain the pixels and be like how much red is there boost the red up as much as possible boost the blue up as much as possible but this is kind of what they were seeing and all of those distinct colors