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The Artemis II crew just reported several impact flashes—explosions from hypervelocity impacts of meteoroids with the Moon—during the solar eclipse. We make a big effort to see a handful of these from Earth with telescopes. That astronauts flying by the Moon saw >4 in tens of minutes is AWESOME.

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They have most likely been seeing that kind of background flash for the whole mission, and several of them this isn't their first time in space. I suspect they can tell the difference.

They've spent most of the time within Earth's magnetosphere, and only 4 days outside of it. And the flashes are faint, they'd have to look carefully in the dark. IDK, they say they don't trust instruments, when usually instruments can be made to be a lot more precise than eyes.

There are many cameras on Integrity, both the external monitors and the handhelds used by the crew. They will be able to distinguish between impact flashes and phosphenes from cosmic ray hits.

This is what a (fairly large) impact flash looks like on the Moon when viewed from Earth. This 12-frame sequence from the NELIOTA project in 2017 shows an impact flash that appears and fades over four frames. Credit: NELIOTA Project

Uhh. If meteorites coming from behind them are blasting the moon in front of them, they’re in between? Implies they’re dodging bullets every minute they’re out there, that would scare the crap out of me.

I understand it’s like shooting a machine gun at a mosquito, but the odds don’t comfort me all that much the longer I’m out there. These are presumably also whizzing at Earth during the ~9 days they’re in transit, right?