NASA’s Latest Moon Discovery Is Raising Serious Questions About the Dark Side

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]NASA says the four astronauts on board its Artemis 2 moon mission are safe, secure, and in great spirits following their successful launch from Florida.

[00:00:08]They are performing various checks to ensure the reliability and safety of the Orion spacecraft that has never carried humans before. This was the moment it lifted off.

[00:00:17]>> NASA just found something on the dark side of the moon that they cannot fully explain. It started on April 6th, 2026 when four astronauts, Reed Weisman, Victor Glover, Christina Ko, and Jeremy Hansen, slip behind the lunar far side and lost all contact with Earth for 40 minutes. What they saw out those windows, paired with rocks pulled from that same hidden hemisphere 2 years earlier, has scientists quietly admitting that the half of the moon we have never been allowed to see is hiding something. And the questions it is raising right now are not the ones anyone expected. The half nobody has ever seen.

[00:00:56]>> There's a lot out there to explore. And this is the next beginning. And this is the Aremis generation.

[00:01:03]>> Because here is the thing about the back of the moon. You have to understand what it is before you can understand why what they saw matters. The moon is tidily locked. The same hemisphere always points at Earth. Has for billions of years. like a guard standing at a door who never once turns around. And until 1959, no human had any idea what was behind that door. When we finally did see it, it broke something. The side of the moon facing us is covered in those big dark plains. The Maria, the ancient lava flows that make up the man in the moon face you have looked at your whole life. 31% of the near side is covered in them. On the far side, the number is 1%.

[00:01:46]one two halves of the same moon and they look like they have nothing to do with each other. Almost as if something violent happened to one side billions of years ago and left the other side relatively untouched. That first look came from a Soviet probe called Luna 3 in October of 1959. Luna 1 became the first human-made object to reach the vicinity of the moon, opening a new era of Luna exploration.

[00:02:11]>> The pictures were terrible. grainy, blurry, barely better than smudges on a piece of film. The probe used a tiny onboard dark room to develop its own film in space, then scanned the wet negatives and beamed the signal home. 29 images of a world that had been hiding in plain sight for as long as our species has existed. And when scientists looked at them, they were not just surprised, they were stunned into silence. The far side was a wasteland of craters. Layer on top of layer on top of layer. Crater inside, crater inside, crater. A surface that looked like it had been used as target practice by the entire solar system for 4 billion years.

[00:02:50]Like it had been built by different hands, like it was a separate world that had somehow gotten stuck to ours. And listen, before we go any further into this, if you are still here, if this is already pulling you in, do me a favor and hit subscribe because what I am about to tell you next is the part where the mystery stops being a mystery from old probes and starts being a mystery.

[00:03:13]NASA is actively right now trying to crack open. The samples are already on Earth. The astronauts have already come home and the questions they brought back with them are getting louder, not quieter. Stay with me. a lopsided world because the technology kept getting better and the moon kept its secret. In 2011, NASA launched twin spacecraft called the Grail mission. Two probes chasing each other around the moon, measuring the tiny variations in distance between them as the gravity beneath them shifted. They were called Eb and Flow. They flew so close to the surface in the final phase of the mission that they eventually crashed into the lunar far side themselves on purpose, ending their lives as two more small impacts on the strangest hemisphere in the inner solar system.

[00:04:00]And what they sent back before they died honestly was hard to believe. The crust on the far side is roughly 20 km thicker than the crust on the near side.

[00:04:09]>> That's because the crust, the actual lithosphere of the moon is much thicker on the far side than the near side. And again that's weird like why why should that be why is there a dichotomy like that and so one one idea there is that actually two moons formed in this process and then one kind of pancakes onto the back 20 km that is not a rounding error that is a fundamental difference between two halves of the same world. The chemistry is different too. The radioactive heat producing elements, the uranium, the thorium, the potassium are concentrated almost entirely on the near side in a region called the proellarum creep terrain.

[00:04:48]Picture it as a giant blanket of hot radioactive material sitting under one face of the moon and basically nothing on the other side. And here is the catch. Buried beneath the surface in places nobody can directly see, there are these dense pockets of material called masons. Mass concentrations so heavy they tug a spacecraft off course as it passes overhead. Apollo astronauts noticed it. Soviet probes noticed it.

[00:05:14]Modern missions still have to correct for it. Every spacecraft we have ever sent to the moon has been pulled just slightly by the strange hidden weights buried inside this lopsided world. The moon is not a uniform ball of rock. It is lopsided, topheavy in some places, hollow in others. And by now, by the time Grail finished its work, the question was no longer whether the two sides were different. The question was, what could possibly have done that to a single body in space? Scientists threw out theories. One said Earth once had two moons and they crashed into each other in slow motion with the smaller one splatting onto what is now the far side. Another said, "A dwarf planet roughly 780 km across smashed into the near side at 22,500 km hour, reshaping the moon's insides forever." Both theories had supporters.

[00:06:05]Neither could be proven. The moon kept its secret, the wound that explains everything. And then in 2022, a team at Brown University published something that finally felt like a real answer.

[00:06:18]Local students helped to develop the details of a mission to the moon.

[00:06:22]>> And part of the planning is being done right here in Rhode Island.

[00:06:25]>> Come up with a number of questions they hope will be answered in a future moon mission.

[00:06:30]>> Stay with me because this is where it gets good. They focused on the South Pole Atkin Basin. This is one of the largest known impact craters in the entire solar system, 1600 km wide, sitting on the far side like a wound that never healed. To give you a sense of scale, if you carved out the South Pole Akin Basin and dropped it on the United States, it would stretch roughly from New York to Texas. That is the size of the hit we are talking about. The Brown team showed that the impact that carved out that basin would have generated a colossal plume of heat propagating through the lunar interior like a shock wave through molten rock.

[00:07:07]And that plume would have carried the rare earth elements and the heat producing materials away from the far side, concentrating them on the near side, which would explain everything. It would explain why the near side erupted with lava for billions of years, filling its basins with dark bay salt. It would explain why the far side stayed cold and quiet and ancient. One impact billions of years ago, splitting the moon into two fundamentally different worlds. the wound on one face leaking the heat and the volatiles out of the other. It was a beautiful theory, but here's the thing.

[00:07:40]It was still just a theory. Nobody had ever held a piece of the far side in their hands. Nobody had ever actually tested the rock. The entire story, as elegant as it was, was being built on telescopes and orbiters and computer models. Until someone could land on the far side, scoop up a piece of it, and bring it home, the question was going to stay open. That changed, too. 4 lb of evidence. In June of 2024, a Chinese spacecraft called Chang A6 did something no nation had ever done. It landed on the far side of the moon, right inside the South Pole Aken Basin, the exact spot the Brown team had pointed to. It scooped up 1,935 g of soil and rock.

[00:08:22]>> There's a lot of people who don't believe we actually brought any rocks back from the moon.

[00:08:25]>> We brought a lot of rocks back from the moon, a lot of samples, and they're really interesting and unique. just over four pounds of material. And then in an engineering feat that almost did not get enough attention, it lifted off, rendevoused with a return vehicle, and brought those samples all the way back to Earth. The first pieces of the far side ever held by human hands. And when the Chinese team opened those containers, the results sent shock waves through the scientific community.

[00:08:54]Radiometric dating showed that volcanic activity on the far side had occurred roughly 2.83 83 billion years ago.

[00:09:01]Combined with earlier evidence of eruptions around 4.2 billion years ago, that means volcanism on the far side persisted for at least 1.4 billion years, way longer than anyone predicted for a region that was supposed to be stripped of its heat producing elements.

[00:09:17]The far side was not dead. It had been alive geologically for over a billion years longer than the models said it should have been. But here is the thing.

[00:09:25]The real bombshell was about water. The mantle on the far side is significantly drier than the mantle on the near side.

[00:09:33]The water content measured in the source rock was just 1 to 1.5 micrograms per gram. To put that in perspective, that is roughly a thousand times drier than the materials Apollo brought back from the near side. Bone dry on one side of the same moon. And this is the part that matters because the water asymmetry confirmed for the first time with actual rocks in an actual lab is direct evidence supporting the giant impact hypothesis. The theory that the moon was born when a Mars-sized object called Thea slammed into the young earth roughly 4 12 billion years ago.

[00:10:09]Different water on different sides means the moon mixed unevenly as it formed.

[00:10:14]Something disrupted the process.

[00:10:16]Something pushed the volatiles toward one hemisphere. The cataclysm that gave birth to the moon left fingerprints on it that we can still measure today.

[00:10:24]Fingerprints in the rock, fingerprints in the water, fingerprints in the asymmetry. 4 1/2 billion years later, we are still reading the receipt from the day the moon was born. The Chinese team also pulled ancient magnetic field data out of those samples. First time anyone had ever done that from the far side.

[00:10:41]>> China says it has now begun analyzing data collected by its Changi 5 probe on the moon. The samples were gathered in the past week and haven't yet been returned to Earth. That is likely to happen in the coming days. It's the first time lunar rock has been gathered since the 1970s. And what they found was strange. Around 2.8 billion years ago, the moon's magnetic field appears to have rebounded in intensity. The lunar dynamo, the internal engine that once generated a global magnetic field, did not just fade away. It fluctuated. It pulsed. It came back. Think about that for a second. The moon, this small, cold, supposedly dead body, had an internal engine that should have shut off long before that. Instead, it sputtered back to life, then sputtered again, then went quiet. The lead researcher described it as humanity's first direct access to evidence about the deep interior of the far side. A direct window finally, into the heart of that hidden hemisphere. But here is the question they could not answer. Why? Why did the dynamo pulse? Why did the volcanism last so long? Why is the water gone on one side and present on the other? Why does the wound on the far side keep producing surprises every time we dig deeper? They had the rocks. They had the dates. They had the measurements. But the deeper question, the question of what is actually going on inside the far side of the moon was still wide open. And in some ways, the Chang A6 results made it bigger because every answer those samples gave came with two more questions attached. And that is when the astronauts went up. 40 minutes of silence back to April 6th, 2026.

[00:12:21]Wisman, Glover, Ko, Hansen, inside Orion, falling behind the moon. The radio dies. The telemetry goes flat.

[00:12:30]They are now the farthest human beings from Earth in the entire history of our species. 252,756 mi from home. More than 4,100 miles past the record set by Apollo 13.

[00:12:45]>> Four NASA astronauts making history, traveling farther from Earth than any humans ever have.

[00:12:51]>> But still within reach for the president, and tonight, President Trump called the crew of the Aremis 2.

[00:12:57]>> And for the next 40 minutes, they are alone with a view nobody has ever had.

[00:13:02]Glover is at the window. He is the first black astronaut to ever fly around the moon. He is staring at the terminator line. the boundary where lunar day meets lunar night. Sunlight cutting hard across the surface below him. The contrast is brutal. On one side of the line, every crater is lit up. Every ridge throws a shadow. On the other side, total darkness, like someone drew a knife across the surface of the world.

[00:13:26]Later, he will try to describe it. He will say, "There was so much magic in the Terminator. Islands of light, valleys that looked like black holes."

[00:13:35]He will say that if you stepped into some of those shadows, you would fall straight to the center of the moon. But right now, in the silence, he is just looking, trying to take it in, knowing that as he looks, he is the first human in history to see this with his own eyes. Koke is at another window. She is watching the small, fresh impact craters scattered across the far side. She notices something. The smaller craters are brighter than anyone expected. Way brighter. Like the surface around them is the dusty top of an old lampshade.

[00:14:06]And someone has punched tiny pin prick holes through it. And light is leaking out wherever a fresh strike has cracked the ancient skin of the moon and exposed the bright material underneath. A lampshade full of pin prick holes on a world nobody has ever seen this close.

[00:14:22]And she realizes looking down at them that every one of those bright little points is a record, a time stamp, a moment in the history of the solar system where something hit hard and exposed something newer than the surface around it. The far side is not just a graveyard. It is a log book and it has been recording in real time for 4 and a half billion years. And then the sun goes behind the moon. For 53 minutes, the Aremis 2 crew sit inside a total solar eclipse from space. The longest total solar eclipse ever observed from Earth's surface lasted about 7 minutes.

[00:14:57]>> Astronauts describe what they're seeing.

[00:15:00]Let's talk about what's happening now and the solar eclipse that they are experiencing.

[00:15:04]>> Paulo missions were much closer in their orbits around the moon. So, they weren't quite high enough to see what what this crew is seeing.

[00:15:11]>> Wiseman, Glover, Ko, Hansen got nearly an hour of it. An hour of staring at a black disc surrounded by the thin glowing wisps of the sun's corona. They will call those wisps baby hairs.

[00:15:24]Filaments of plasma reaching out from a sun they cannot see dancing around the silhouette of a moon. Nobody has ever seen this clearly. And in that deep darkness behind the moon without the glare of the sun and without the glow of earth lighting up their windows, they see something nobody had expected to see at all. Flashes. Six of them. Brief sharp pops of light on the dark surface below. Meteoroid impacts. Rocks from space slamming into the far side in real time. Witnessed by human eyes for the first time in history. Six tiny moments of violence observed by four people who until that moment had no business being there. Each flash a reminder. The moon is not a dead world. It is still being shaped, still being struck, still being written on by the same forces that wrote it in the beginning. They photographed the Vavalov crater on the rim of the ancient Herz sprung basin. Watching the way the smooth material inside the basin gives way to the rugged broken terrain outside it. They image the Oriental Basin, a 600 km wide ringed crater that straddles both sides of the moon. The kind of structure that looks like a target painted on the surface. Three concentric rings of mountain ranges left over from an impact so violent it sent ripples through the entire crust.

[00:16:40]Oriental visible in its entirety from space for the first time through human eyes. And they looked directly at the South Pole Atkin basin itself. The same basin Chong six sampled. The same basin Brown University identified as ground zero for the moon's lopsided history.

[00:16:58]The largest, deepest, oldest known impact structure on the moon. The wound.

[00:17:04]From orbit, it does not even look like a single crater. It looks like the moon got hit so hard that part of it just gave up. A massive dark depression sprawling across the southern hemisphere of the far side with mountains rising along its edges and a floor that drops kilome below the surrounding terrain.

[00:17:22]NASA's associate administrator for science Nikki Fox said the images coming back were so exquisite, so brimming with science they would inspire generations to come. She was not exaggerating. But here is the thing. Here is what is actually happening right now in the rooms where scientists are looking at all of this data. They are not relaxing.

[00:17:42]They are not closing the case. The Chang 6 samples and the Artemis 2 photographs did not answer the question of what the far side is. They sharpened it because the more we learn about that hemisphere, the stranger it gets.

[00:17:55]>> The radio picked up a strange signal on the far side of the moon. They described it as whistling space music.

[00:18:02]>> Every crater on the far side is a fossil. Every basin is a wound and we are only now for the very first time beginning to read what is written there.

[00:18:10]And there is something else hiding on the far side. Something that has both scientists and governments very very interested. The quietest place in the solar system. The far side by being permanently shielded from Earth receives absolutely no human radio interference.

[00:18:27]None. It is the quietest place in the inner solar system for radio astronomy.

[00:18:31]A telescope placed there could listen for signals that are completely impossible to detect from Earth. Drowned out as they are by our own electromagnetic noise. Cell phones, satellites, television broadcasts, all of it. None of it reaches the far side.

[00:18:47]A radio observatory on the far side would not just be the most sensitive ever built. It would be looking for things nobody has ever been able to look for before. Faint whispers from the early universe. signals from cosmic events too quiet to hear over the static of our own civilization. And depending on who you ask, possibly something else entirely. And here is where it gets serious. There is a resource buried in that ancient soil. Because the far side is not partially shielded by Earth's magnetosphere the way the near side is.

[00:19:18]It has been bathed in solar wind for billions of years, uninterrupted.

[00:19:22]Particle after particle from the sun slamming into the surface embedding in the dust layer after layer for longer than complex life has existed on earth and that means the far side Maria are expected to contain the highest concentration of helium 3 anywhere on the lunar surface >> of helium two protons and one neutron um it's plentiful in space because it's made naturally in the sun and so the solar wind has helium 3 and other gases uh it's been bombarding the surface of the moon the moon has been a target for helium 3 for for billions of years.

[00:19:54]>> Helium 3 is so rare on Earth, we measure it in fractions of a gram. The entire global supply is estimated at a few hundred kg. It is also a potential fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, the kind of clean, worldchanging energy source that humans have been chasing for over half a century without ever quite catching it.

[00:20:13]One ton of helium 3 fused with dutyium in the right kind of reactor could theoretically generate as much energy as 15 million tons of coal, 15 million tons from one ton of dust. And estimates suggest there could be over a million tons of it sitting on the moon just sitting there. The race to claim it. Now stay with me because this is the part nobody is saying out loud yet, but everybody in the room knows. The far side of the moon is no longer just an unanswered scientific question. It is a target. And the answer to the question of what is hiding there is going to determine in part what the rest of this century looks like. Both the United States and China understand exactly what this means. NASA's Aremis 4 mission currently targeted for early 2028 is aiming to land astronauts near the south pole of the moon, right on the edge between the near side and the far side.

[00:21:08]China has Chang 7 scheduled for 2026 to survey for water ice at the South Pole and Chang 8 in 2028 to test resource utilization on site in real time. Both nations are building toward permanent bases.

[00:21:23]>> In our spotlight, the next frontier may not be on Earth, but far beyond it. NASA has unveiled groundbreaking plans for a 20 billion moon base. It's an ambitious three-step plan toward putting humans back on the moon and keeping them there.

[00:21:39]>> And the South Pole, straddling the boundary between the two halves of the moon, is exactly where those ambitions converge. This is not just about flags.

[00:21:48]It is not just about footprints. It is about who gets to be the first to actually answer the questions the rocks have been asking for 4 12 billion years.

[00:21:57]The far side is no longer just a scientific curiosity. It is the next frontier. And it is going to be claimed.

[00:22:04]What is really hiding there? So now finally we can ask it. What is really hiding on the dark side of the moon? Not aliens, not secret bases. Nothing the conspiracy theorists ever guessed.

[00:22:16]Something more profound than any of that. Evidence of a cataclysmic birth. A 4 12 billionyear-old wound from the collision that made the moon in the first place. An interior so lopsided that one half erupted with lava for over a billion years while the other froze into a cratered wasteland. A magnetic field that pulsed and rebounded when scientists thought it was already dying.

[00:22:39]A mantle bone dry in ways the near side is not. The fingerprints of the most violent event in the early history of our solar system, preserved in stone, visible now for the first time to human eyes. and a silence so deep, so total, so free from the noise of our species that it might be the best place in the entire inner solar system to listen for signals from somewhere else. For all of human history, we have looked up at the moon and seen only one face, the same face night after night, century after century. And that face, it turns out, has been hiding the most extraordinary half of the story this whole time. The half we are only now in this exact moment finally beginning to read. The crew of Artemis 2 came home on April 11th, 2026.

[00:23:27]>> 2 astronauts are tonight back on Earth healthy and very happy after their record-breaking trip to the moon and back. The first lunar mission since 1972 is being considered a roaring success.

[00:23:38]The splashdown watched across the globe.

[00:23:40]They brought back over 15,000 photographs, hours of video, observations that scientists are still going to be analyzing 5 years from now.

[00:23:49]And somewhere in that data, in those images, in the patterns of craters and the colors of basaltt, and the timing of those six tiny flashes in the dark, there are answers to questions our species has been asking for thousands of years. Why is the moon the way it is?

[00:24:04]What happened to it? What happened to us? Because the moon and the earth share a history. They were born together. They were shaped by the same forces. And every secret the moon gives up is a secret about where we came from, too.

[00:24:18]Now, here is what I want to know from you. If you could send a single instrument to the far side of the moon, just one piece of equipment to study what is there. What would you send? A radio telescope to listen for signals nobody has ever heard? A drill to dig down through that ancient crust and see what is sleeping underneath? a camera pointed at deep space away from the light of Earth looking at galaxies we have never been able to see clearly before. Drop your answer in the comments. I want to read them all because the far side of the moon is not a question we have answered yet. It is a question we are just barely starting to ask. And the next chapter of that story belongs to whoever shows up to write it.

[00:24:58]If you have made it this far, thank you.

[00:25:00]Hit subscribe so you do not miss what comes next. and I will see you on the next