On 6 April, the astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission flew in a loop around the far side of the moon. They travelled more than 406,700 kilometres from Earth, further than any humans have travelled before.
The four crew members – Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen – alternated shifts at the Orion capsule’s windows looking out at Earth and the moon (above). The reflection of sunlight off Earth’s surface, called earthshine, was so bright that they covered one of the windows with a spare shirt.
As they passed behind the moon, the astronauts were treated to a view of areas that had never before been seen by human eyes, such as the entirety of a crater called Orientale basin (below). The dark patch at the centre of the crater is dried lava from an eruptions billions of years ago. The astronauts proposed new names for two smaller craters near Orientale: Integrity, after their spacecraft, and Carroll, after Wiseman’s late wife.
Over the course of the mission, the phases of both Earth and the moon changed rapidly from the perspective of the spacecraft. “The moon is a gibbous and the Earth is a crescent,” Hansen said at one point. When Orion started to circle to the moon’s far side, the crescent Earth set behind the moon (below).
Glover expressed a particular fascination with the moon’s terminator, the line between day and night. At that line, the sunlight hits the ground at an acute angle that casts long shadows, accentuating the terrain and revealing details that wouldn’t be visible under full illumination (below). “There is just so much magic in the terminator – the islands of light, the valleys that look like black holes [where] you’d fall straight to the centre of the moon if you stepped in some of those. It’s just so visually captivating,” he said.
While on the far side, the astronauts could not communicate with mission control on Earth, but they continued taking pictures and dictating notes into voice recorders. At one point, they witnessed a unique solar eclipse that lasted nearly an hour (below). The sun was hidden entirely behind the moon, while the side of the moon facing Earth remained illuminated by earthshine.
Now, their flyby a success, the astronauts are on their way back to Earth. They are expected to arrive on 10 April, when Orion will splash down off the coast of California.
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