‘Just unbelievable’: This is what astronauts saw as they approached the moon

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As the Artemis II spacecraft emerged from the far side of the moon, its crew began radioing Earth to describe what they had just seen.

“It’s extraordinary to be on the far side of the moon … looking back at the Earth,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said on Monday before communication was cut.

Due to a phenomenon known as tidal locking, only one side of the moon is visible from our planet. The first images of the moon’s far side were provided by a Soviet probe in 1959. Before Artemis, the only people to ever see the moon’s far side with their own eyes were American astronauts during the Apollo era between 1968 and 1972. Despite receiving sunlight, the largely unseen lunar hemisphere is also commonly known as the dark side of the moon.

As the Artemis II capsule slipped behind the moon to its far side, communication with Earth was severed for approximately 40 minutes.

“It is blowing my mind what you can see with the naked eye from the moon right now,” Hansen said before communication was cut. “It is just unbelievable.”

The astronauts noted that newer craters on the lunar surface appeared brighter than their ancient neighbours.

“There’s a couple that really stand out,” NASA astronaut Christina Koch explained. “What it really looks like is a lampshade with tiny pinprick holes and the light shining through.”

The crews’ descriptions included several impact flashes as space debris struck the lunar surface. They also became the first humans to directly observe what’s known as the Orientale Basin, which is approximately 950 kilometres wide and features three concentric impact rings, making it resemble a bullseye.

Just as the crew capsule was about to go behind the moon, astronauts captured a dramatic “Earthset” image of the Earth dipping below the lunar horizon. The photograph comes nearly six decades after an Apollo 8 astronaut took the iconic “Earthrise” image of our planet rising above the moon.

Astronauts also witnessed a solar eclipse. As the moon blocked their view of the sun, they were surprised with how well they could see the lunar surface reflected in light from Earth – a phenomenon known as “earthshine.”

“I think it’s challenging to capture what we’re seeing — we’re just not picking up on the cameras,” Artemis astronaut Victor Glover said. “It is the strangest-looking thing, that you can see so much on the surface.”

The Artemis crew also provided new descriptions of the moon’s familiar near side. Artemis astronauts described seeing brown and greenish hues.

“Something I just heard from the window team is ‘the more I look at the moon, the browner and browner it looks,’” Koch said as her colleagues peered at the lunar surface.

Jesse Rogerson, an astronomer and assistant professor at York University, says such colours can help us better understand the moon’s evolution.

“This is something I was not expecting, because we look at the moon every night and we see it as greys and whites and blacks,” Rogerson told CTV’s Your Morning on Tuesday. “We don’t see the greens and the browns that they were reporting.”

With files from The Canadian Press and CNN