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New Video Sheds More Light On Dark Side Of The Moon

The south pole of the far side of the moon as seen from the GRAIL mission's Ebb spacecraft.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The south pole of the far side of the moon as seen from the GRAIL mission's Ebb spacecraft.

New video from NASA gives us a fresh view of the far side of the moon (or the technically incorrect but way cooler sounding "dark side").

It's from NASA's Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) lunar spacecraft.

And just for the record, some news outlets have looked at the space agency's headline — "NASA Mission Returns First Video From Moon's Far Side" — and are reporting that this is the first time we've seen images from there. That's not correct. What NASA seems to have tried to say is that this is the first video of the far side from this mission.

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Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.