NASA FLEW FOUR ASTRONAUTS TO THE MOON AND THEY CAME BACK CALLING IT JAUNDICED

The moon is gray. That has been the arrangement since 1969. Then NASA released a 130-page Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report, and the four people who got closest to the thing since 1972 described something closer to a bruise. Christina Koch stared at the Aristarchus Plateau, called it a yellow snow-capped mountain, then went further and labeled it "a jaundiced cheek of the Moon." Over the Orientale Basin she clocked the outermost ring as having almost swamp-like colors. Victor Glover, busy photographing, offered "there are so many colors now" and flagged green and brown around Aristarchus. Reid Wiseman went with brownish-green glass. These four spent more than two years training to observe and describe lunar geology, visiting craters on Earth and running simulated flybys, and the vocabulary that came out was swamp, jaundice and glass. It is still real science. The report ties the colors to mineralogy, with orange hues pointing to titanium-rich glass beads and green to magnesium-rich deposits, the same material Apollo 15 and 17 brought home. The full archive went public on Oct. 7: more than 800 gigabytes, around 11,000 images, and 8.5 hours of crew audio. Three of them also caught five faint flashes on the surface, which scientists later assessed as rocky fragments hitting the moon while they watched.

Why you should give a shit: The jaundiced cheek of the moon is also a mineral map, which means NASA is scouting the first lunar base using a color scheme the crew compared to a swamp and a liver problem.