Let the kids fly it
GRAIL carried a camera on each spacecraft with one purpose: to let middle-school students, not scientists, choose what to photograph. A classroom picked a target, the request went to a mission operations center in San Diego run by Sally Ride's team, and the spacecraft turned and took the shot. More than 2,700 schools in 52 countries flew it. Pick a target below and downlink a real recovered frame, the way a classroom did.
- Only 18 frames survived on the public web. About 5,100 are back after 14 years lost.
- Images come from both spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, including image #50, the first photo MoonKAM ever took.
- You can task the cameras yourself in the mission-ops console below, then browse the recovered archive.
Task the spacecraft to receive an image.
Every frame you receive here is a real recovered MoonKAM image, shown with the date, camera and orbit it was actually taken on. The program was led by Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. When the mission ended, GRAIL's crash site was named for her.
The archive, recovered
For over a decade the full-resolution student gallery was gone, and this page used to end on an open question about where it went. In September 2026 the answer arrived: the technical team at Sally Ride Science still had the images on an old laptop backup. Some are the very first pictures MoonKAM ever took, chosen by the fourth-grade class at Emily Dickinson Elementary in Bozeman, Montana that won the contest to name Ebb and Flow, beating nearly 900 classrooms and 11,000 students across 45 states.
For the people behind these pictures, the naming contest, and Sally Ride's role, see Voices from MoonKAM. For the Moon lessons the program gave teachers, see the classroom kit.
Recovered footage
The MoonKAM cameras shot video, not just stills. These recordings came back with the archive and are now preserved on YouTube. Two are below; the promos and the full, near-five-hour recording are linked beneath them.
More recovered video: the Moon up close (promo film) · a short view · the full ~5-hour recording.
Frames that first got out
Before the gallery went offline, someone saved a handful of frames to Wikimedia Commons. For years these were the largest set still publicly reachable, at the small size the gallery served them. They are kept here as they were found, alongside the recovered archive above.
Hold a fuller MoonKAM set, or know where one lives? Get in touch.
The last thing it saw
Eighty seconds of the lunar surface sliding past, filmed by the same camera system the students had been aiming all year. There is no sound, because there was never any sound.
Three days after this was recorded, Ebb was out of fuel. It was steered into a mountain near the north pole at 3,760 miles per hour, with Flow seconds behind it. The impact site was named for Sally Ride.
