A new NASA video shows the moon like you've never seen it before.
The five-minute clip, released by the space agency on April 9, shows the surface of our nearest neighbor in the solar system in stunning, high-definition detail — from high peaks and deep craters to the frigid poles and their possible ice deposits.
You get a close-up look at the landing site of Apollo 17, the last of the missions that sent astronauts to the moon — and you can even see part of the mission's lunar lander and rover.
"For me what jumps out is not just the Google Street View kind of clarity we now have on lunar terrain, but the insights to how this terrain got to be the way it is — from asteroid impacts to a diverse history of volcanism," Dr. Caleb Scharf, an astronomer at Columbia University, told NBC News MACH in an email.
Dr. Tyler Nordgren, an astronomer at the University of Redlands and the author of "Sun Moon Earth," was similarly wowed by the video. "It may sound strange for a scientist to say that, but this video reminds me anew about what an amazing, diverse, and spectacular place the moon is," he told MACH in an email. "Far from being a dead world, never changing, it is an ancient place of beauty."
Most of the data used to create the video comes from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009.
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