Artemis II began its historic flyby of the moon Monday in the mission’s showstopper event — giving the crew the world’s first glimpses ever of parts of the lunar dark side, which they described as being “impossibly rugged” and “alien.”
The capsule began the flyby around 2:45 p.m. ET, and will spend just over six hours arcing around the moon with its windows pointed toward the far side of the lunar surface.
Their reports from the capsule windows then began pouring in, with the crew describing an array of colors from oranges and browns, to greens and even whites they said looked brighter than snow on Earth.
“All the really bright, new craters, some of them are super tiny, most of them are pretty small, there’s a couple that really stand out,” astronaut Christina Koch said. “What it really looks like is a lampshade with tiny pinprick holes and the light shining through.”
In this view of the Moon, the near side (the hemisphere we see from Earth), is visible at the top half of the Moon disk. It is identifiable by the dark splotches. These are ancient lava flows from a time early in the Moon’s history when it was volcanically active. The large crater that appears below the lava flows, dark in the center, is Orientale basin, a nearly 600-mile-wide crater that straddles the Moon’s near and far sides as is partly visible from Earth on the edge of the Moon. Everything below the crater is the far side, the hemisphere we don’t get to see from Earth because the Moon rotates on its axis at the same rate that it orbits round us. NASA
Astronaut, Reid Wiseman, shows an image of the moon surface taken on his cell phone during the lunar flypast, shown on the live broadcast.
At the other window at one point – the astronauts worked in two-person shifts peering out the windows – Victor Glover gave a vivid account of the far side’s crater-filled landscape.
“There are islands of terrain out there that are completely surrounded by darkness, which indicates some real variation in terrain,” Glover said. “Up to the north, there is a very nice double crater. It looks like a snowman sitting there.”
Down on Earth the Houston command center’s science team logged everything the astronauts said while prompting them to make certain observations, and also encouraging them to keep using certain kinds of language so they could get the most vivid impression of what the scenes actually looked like.
All four crew members have become the first people in history to see certain swaths of the far side — since most of it remained in shadow when the Apollo missions orbited the moon over 50 years ago.
Live view from the Orion spacecraft at 6 PM ET on Monday. NASAThe Apollo flights were also so close to the surface that their range of sight was limited.
But Artemis II’s flyby is different — the capsule will stay between 4,000 and 6,000 miles from the lunar surface, which will allow the crew to see the entirety of the far side under the full light of the sun.
The moon will appear about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length to the crew looking out the Orion capsule’s windows.
It was also about three to four times larger than Earth as the flyby began, the crew reported.
Artemis II’s astronauts will spend the flyby photographing and making in-person observations of the far side as part of their research.
They will also lose contact with Earth about halfway through the flyby around 6:44 p.m. ET, when the moon itself blocks communications signals between the capsule and Earth.
The Artemis II crew already set the record for the furthest distance traveled from Earth at 2 p.m. ET. APCommunications should be re-established around 7:25 p.m., minutes after Artemis makes its closest pass to the lunar surface at about 4,000 miles in altitude.
The crew has already set the record for the furthest distance traveled from Earth around 2 p.m. ET, when they flew further than Apollo 13’s 248,655-mile record which had stood unbroken since 1970.
Artemis II will continue breaking that record, reaching about 252,757 miles from Earth by the time they’re through.
The flyby will end around 9:20 p.m., and the crew will be on their way home to Earth from then on.
But they won’t need to fire their thrusters to get back, as the capsule will have used the moon’s gravity to slingshot it back to Earth.
It will be a four-day journey home, with the capsule expected to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean around 8:07 p.m. ET on Friday.
And if all goes well, astronauts will go back up for an Earth-orbiting mission in 2027 under Artemis III and then walk on the moon in 2028 for Artemis IV.
