The Artemis II crew may have finished their voyage around the moon, but for first-year Johns Hopkins University student Reba Prabhakhar, the work is just beginning. As a member of visiting researcher Ben Fernando’steam, Prabhakhar is working on NASA’s Impact Flash! project, a global effort to study impacts on the moon.
Thanks to its lack of atmosphere, the moon is constantly getting hit with meteoroids, which cause its famous craters. In the moment a space rock collides with the moon and vaporizes, a small amount of the impact’s energy becomes a flash of light, visible to nearby spacecraft and, if the conditions are right, telescopes on Earth.
These flashes are common. The question is, how common?
“It’s really hard to have an accurate understanding how often they happen,” says Prabhakhar, who is double majoring in physics and applied math and statistics. “Last semester, I was looking at this catalog of lunar impact flash observations from the 1900s. Even throughout the whole 20th century, there’s only about a couple hundred pages of observations. There’s not that much.”
By better cataloguing the frequency and intensity of these flashes, scientists can deduce what kinds of craters and shockwaves they create. This, in turn, will give mankind a better understanding of how impacts could affect future explorers who touch down on the moon’s surface.
To conduct this research, Impact Flash! is encouraging people around the world to record videos of the moon through their telescopes. It’s one of NASA’s 32 Citizen Science projects, which asks everyday volunteers to contribute to research.
“The more data, the better, especially for something like this,” says Prabhakhar. “It’s really hard to trust observations made by just one telescope, or even just two telescopes in the same area. So when we have volunteers, hopefully from around the world, looking from different areas and they all record the same flash, that gives us a lot better confidence that the flash actually occurred.”
Once the videos are sent in, it’ll be Prabhakhar’s job to sort through the data.
Impact Flash! was especially interested in video taken during the Artemis II mission, when the astronauts were also watching for lunar impacts. In this way, Prabhakhar’s work directly intersects with that of Artemis II commander and Johns Hopkins alum Reid Wiseman, Engr ’06 (MS), a crossover she describes as “really cool.”
“When I was first interested in doing research, I was really scared that I was going to be useless,” says Prabhakhar. “But I’m glad that I just tried asking before I even was sure that I was ready. … There’s always a way to contribute.”
This excerpt was taken from the Hub. You can read the full story here.