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The commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission stared at the Moon for nearly eight hours on Monday. He finally could not find the words to describe the view.
“No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal,” said Reid Wiseman, the Navy test pilot leading the four-person crew. “There are no adjectives. I’m going need to invent some new ones.”
Live video from the Orion spacecraft showed the Moon getting larger as it approached. The Artemis II astronauts were expected to send sharper pictures to Earth. Wiseman and his crewmates—Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—spent three years training. They learned to fly their Orion capsule, named Integrity, and prepared for emergencies.
Artemis II is the first human mission to go near the Moon in over 53 years. NASA taught the astronauts about geology and photography so they could record their observations. That training proved useful. The Orion spacecraft has worked well since its launch last week. On Monday, the crew flew behind the Moon. They reached their closest point to the lunar surface, about 4,067 miles away. Two minutes later, Artemis II reached its farthest point from Earth. It set a new record for the farthest humans have traveled from Earth, at 252,756 miles.
These events happened as the spacecraft was out of sight behind the Moon. Mission controllers in Houston lost radio contact with the astronauts. After about 40 minutes, Artemis II came back into view and restored communications.
During the flyby, the four astronauts radioed their impressions of the Moon’s craters, mountains, and volcanic marks. They took pictures and wrote down what they saw. Their language showed they had learned about lunar geology. None of the astronauts were trained geologists before the mission. They had taken classes and gone on geology field trips to learn.
Then, the Sun disappeared behind the Moon. This revealed a scene that was hard to describe. The Moon was lit only by “Earthshine.” This is the faint, colored sunlight reflected from Earth’s continents, oceans, clouds, and ice caps, which are a quarter-million miles away.
From the Orion capsule, the Moon blocked the Sun for almost an hour. This perfect alignment was lucky, based on the mission’s path after its April 1 launch. A slightly different path would not have created an eclipse.
Pilot Victor Glover told mission control that their cameras could not capture the true beauty of the view.
“What we’re seeing, we’re just not picking up on the cameras,” Glover said. “After all the amazing sights that we saw earlier, we just went sci-fi. It just looks unreal.”
About 30 minutes later, Glover added: “I’m really glad we launched on April 1 because humans have probably not evolved to see what we’re seeing. It is truly hard to describe.”
People watching an eclipse from Earth can see the solar corona, the Sun’s outer atmosphere. For the Artemis II crew, the corona created a glowing ring around the Moon’s edge.
“It’s glowing behind the entire Moon,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said. “I thought it would look dark against the black sky, but the Sun is lighting up the entire edge.”
Glover pointed out stars and planets that are usually hidden by sunlight.
“That was an absolutely spectacular, magnificent experience,” Wiseman said after the eclipse ended. He asked mission control for about 20 new words to help his vocabulary.
A short time later, Artemis II passed the distance record set by the Apollo 13 mission. An astronaut in mission control marked the moment with a radio call. Hansen then asked if the crew could name two craters on the Moon. One would be named for their Integrity spacecraft. The other would be for Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died in 2020.
“There’s a feature in a really neat place on the Moon,” Hansen said of Carroll Crater. “It’s a bright spot. We would like to call it Carroll.”
It was an emotional moment for the crew and for many watching from Earth. After sharing an embrace, the astronauts returned to their observations.
From Earth, Artemis II seemed to approach the Moon from the side. As it got closer, it traveled toward the far side. This gave the astronauts a view of lunar terrain never before seen by humans in daylight. About 20 percent of the far side was lit during the flyby.
Before Artemis II, only robotic missions had taken pictures of large areas of the far side. This included Mare Orientale, an ancient impact basin nearly 600 miles wide. Artemis II got a long look. The astronauts described the three circular mountain rings coming from the basin’s center. To the naked eye, the rings looked as if they were dusted with chalk or snow, Glover said.
Glover then described the terminator. This is the line between night and day on the Moon. “It is the most rugged that I’ve seen it from a lighting perspective,” he said. “There are islands of terrain out there that are completely surrounded by darkness.”
Scientists have known for decades what the Moon’s far side looks like, thanks to robots. Those earlier missions carried more scientific instruments than Artemis II. But the crew’s observations have value. Artemis II flew much farther from the Moon than a robotic orbiter, giving a wider view. From more than 4,000 miles away, the crew’s cameras took pictures with detail similar to a closer orbiter’s wide-angle camera. Just as important, the flyby let astronauts offer a human perspective that robots cannot. The real-time observation and feedback served as practice for future Moon landings.
From his view thousands of miles away, Glover imagined walking on the Moon. “I was walking around there on the surface, climbing, and off-roading in amazing terrain,” he said.
In his final message before going behind the Moon, Glover referred to a famous reading from the book of Genesis by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968.
“As we get close to the nearest point to the Moon and the farthest point from Earth, as we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on Earth, and that’s love,” Glover said.
Out of view, Artemis II soared to the farthest point in its flight path. Earth’s gravity then began pulling the Orion spacecraft back home. The mission is on a free return path. This means the gravity of Earth and the Moon are guiding the capsule toward reentry without needing major rocket burns. A few small course corrections are planned in the coming days.
The crew’s encounter with the Moon ended with a call from the President on Monday night.
The current administration is pushing NASA to land humans on the Moon by the end of 2028. The goal is to do this before China’s lunar program can land its own crew. The timeline is aggressive and may not be achievable, but NASA has more Artemis missions planned.
After a recent update, NASA now plans to launch Artemis III as soon as next year. That mission will dock with a lunar lander in low-Earth orbit. Artemis IV will follow with a lunar landing attempt, if all goes well.
The longer-term plan calls for more crew and robotic landers. They would deliver equipment to build a base near the Moon’s south pole. This would be somewhat like the international research stations in Antarctica.
Christina Koch, a spacecraft engineer and Antarctic explorer, said before launch that she hoped this mission would start an era where everyone “can look at the Moon and think of it as also a destination.”
She repeated that thought from near the Moon on Monday. “The truth is the Moon really is its own unique body in the Universe,” Koch said. “It’s not just a poster in the sky that goes by. It is a real place.”