Their diligence was rewarded. The four crewmembers reported seeing several impact flashes — flickers of light created when a meteoroid hits the lunar surface and vaporizes.
Citizen scientists help out
Artemis 2, the first crewed moon flight since Apollo 17 in 1972, launched from Florida's Space Coast on April 1 and flew around the far side of the moon on April 6.
As the astronauts scrutinized the moon that day, so did citizen scientists here on Earth. They were also looking for impact hits, although they would likely not have spotted the same ones as the crew.
Those observations were gathered as part of the newly launched Impact Flash citizen science project under the auspices of the Geophysical Exploration of the Dynamics and Evolution of the Solar System (GEODES), a unit within the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute.
The Impact Flash effort is geared to gather more data on the location and brightness of flashes throughout recent and upcoming Artemis moon missions.
Source: www.space.com
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