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On Sunday night, the moon will be full
and what is extra special

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is that the Earth's shadow
will move across the moon.

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So we will see a total lunar eclipse
and that will be visible across

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much of the world.

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Here on the East Coast,
starting around midnight,

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we will be seeing the total eclipse
and will last about an hour and a half.

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Yeah. I think it's actually

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one of the most beautiful things
about the lunar eclipse.

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So as the earth moves in front of the sun,
it's shadow is blocking the sun.

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And the only light that gets to
the moon's surface

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is that light that is passing
through the Earth's atmosphere.

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And so when you see that
sunset or sunrise,

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you're getting that kind of beautiful,
orange ish reddish glow.

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And if you are standing on the moon,
that is all that you would see that

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orangish reddish glow
from all of the sunsets

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and all of the sunrises
across Earth that are being

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projected through the Earth's atmosphere
and onto the surface of the moon.

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Yeah. So I think one of the
most fun things that we're doing to get

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ready is we have been imaging the moon
and exploring it scientifically

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from orbit for the last 13 years
from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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And so I work on the camera team.

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We've been imaging every square
inch of the moon's surface, making sure

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that we can find landing sites
for the astronauts that are not only safe,

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but they're scientifically interesting
and they can teach us new things

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about the moon when we go
and explore there in person

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. Yeah. The moon is really,
truly beautiful.

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And when we're getting these up close
images, they actually do look like art.

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We've had a couple art
shows of images of the moon,

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but they're not just beautiful,

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even though I think that's
one of the wonderful things about them.

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They're teaching us so much
about the scientific processes

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that we can learn about on the moon.

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Those include impact cratering.

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We're imaging new impact craters that have
formed in the last decade on the moon.

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We're imaging the volcanic
history of the moon.

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So even though much of that was occurring
billions of years ago,

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we can still learn a lot
about how the moon's interior evolved,

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how all of these eruptions
occurred on the moon's surface.

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And some of them actually even occurred

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even more recently
than we would have suspected.

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So on the moon, that's like

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10 million years ago.
but that's still geologically recent.

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And when we're talking about a four
and a half billion year history.

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Yeah. I think one of the

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coolest things that we can use
the moon to understand

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is right here on Earth,
because the Earth's history

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is the very earliest history
on Earth is largely lost.

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Earth is so geologically
active, it's constantly

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reinventing itself
through plate tectonics.

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It's being eroded with weathering wind.

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And so that earliest history
is really lost to time.

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But on the moon, we can look back in time.

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There are craters that are, say,

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100 million years old.
but they look like they formed yesterday.

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And there are craters
that are 4 billion years old

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that can teach us
what was going on in our solar system,

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what big, huge impactors
were hitting the earth-moon system

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right in those times
where life was beginning to form on earth

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and they can teach us

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about the environment on earth
because those impacts had huge effects.

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They would have vaporized the oceans on
Earth and sterilized a lot of the crust.

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So understanding what was going on,
how Earth was being affected by it,

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the space environment

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is really one of the critical things
that we turn to the moon to understand.

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Moon Dot NASA.gov is a fantastic place
to go to learn more about the moon

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and all of the exciting things
that are coming up.

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And then you can, of course,
look to at NASA's moon on Twitter.