The crew of Artemis II completed this morning the flyover of the Moonleft the lunar gravitational environment this afternoon and is already on its way to the Landwhere it will land next Friday, already in the early hours of Saturday in Spain. During the forty-one minutes they spent on the other side of our satellite, cut off from Mission Controlthe astronauts took the opportunity to photographing what very few human beings have seen with their own eyes.
Due to bandwidth limitations in communications with Earth, high resolution images could not be sent in real time once the connection to Mission Control was restored. These arrived this morning and NASA has been uploading them to the Johnson Space Center Flickr page.
During the flyby, the astronauts were able watch the rise and set of the Earth above the lunar horizon, as well as a solar eclipse. The commander Reid Wisemanthe pilot Victor Glover and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansenwho had to put on sunglasses to see it, captured the spectacular nature of the moment when the eclipse was total.
Orion came to be located only 6,545 kilometers of the lunar surface and each astronaut took turns photographing and documenting the Moon, both for the public following the mission from Earth and for the scientific community dedicated to its study.
‘What we are seeing is not captured by cameras. After all the incredible images we saw before, this already seemed like science fiction. It just doesn’t seem real. You can see the surface of the Moon illuminated by the Earth’s glow. In fact, you can see most of the Moon. It looks the strangest one can imagine.‘ Glover told Mission Control.
It is not the first time that the Moon has been flown over or that images have been captured from its hidden side, but had never been obtained with this resolution.