Fly me (partway) to the moon

Last week, scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the University of Guelph sent a telescope to the top of the sky, almost to space itself. The trip was a moonlight-gathering mission that has yielded some of the best measurements ever taken of the brightness, or more specifically the surface reflectance, of Earth's nearest neighbor, the Moon.