Hey, it's Flora and you are listening to Science Friday.

When astronauts are in orbit, most of the messages from Earth come from a person in a role

called Capcom. They're often an experienced astronaut serving as the capsule communicator.

But sometimes during the recent lunar flyby of Artemis 2, the

conversations from mission control came from another desk, one labeled science. If you tuned into the

live stream during the lunar flyby, like we did, obviously, you probably saw my next guest seated

or sometimes excitedly standing at that desk in mission control.

Dr. Kelsey Young is the Artemis Science Flight Operations Lead for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

And she headed up the lunar science observations and photography for the Artemis II mission.

Hey, Kelsey, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me. You can't see me, but I'm smiling ear to ear right now. Have you come down to Earth yet?

I will be honest. I'm a big post processor. So I don't think I've like quite gotten enough,

you know, space from the experience to like kind of truly process things. But I can tell you

that things have not died down. We're working on processing all the data that we got from Artemis

2 while also looking to the future and starting planning for Artemis 3 and 4. Yeah, give me a sense of

the scale of the data. Like, is it just images and how much do you still have to process? Oh, my gosh,

there is so much data and I mean that in the best possible way. We do have four different

types of data. We do have the crew images, of course. That's by far the largest data set,

as you might imagine. We also have a few crew annotations. So they had the ability on their crew

tablets to literally, you know, with a stylist, like, the ability on their crew tablets to like literally,

you know, with a stylist, like annotate on pictures of the moon to say, I saw this here.

And then there were photos and videos taken with the vehicle mounted cameras outside of the,

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