Victor Glover and Christina Koch at the window of the Orion spacecraft
NASA
On 6 April, NASA’s Artemis II mission astronauts navigated a trajectory around the moon’s far side, venturing over 406,700 kilometers from Earth—a distance unprecedented for human travel.
The crew—comprising Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen—took turns observing Earth and the moon from the Orion capsule’s windows. The brightness of earthshine, reflected sunlight from Earth, was so intense that they had to cover one window with a shirt.
During their journey behind the moon, the astronauts witnessed areas never before seen by humans, including the entire Orientale basin crater, distinguished by a central dark patch of ancient dried lava. They suggested naming two smaller nearby craters Integrity, after their spacecraft, and Carroll, in memory of Wiseman’s late wife.
Throughout the mission, both Earth and the moon displayed rapidly changing phases from the spacecraft’s perspective. At one point, Hansen noted, “The moon is a gibbous and the Earth is a crescent.” As Orion circled to the moon’s far side, the crescent Earth disappeared behind it.
Glover found the moon’s terminator—the line dividing day and night—especially intriguing. Sunlight striking the ground at a sharp angle casts long shadows, enhancing the terrain and revealing details obscured under full light. “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 remarked.
While on the moon’s far side, the crew lost contact with mission control but continued to document their journey through photographs and voice recordings. They also witnessed a unique solar eclipse lasting nearly an hour, where the sun was completely obscured by the moon while earthshine lit the moon’s Earth-facing side.
Having completed their lunar flyby, the astronauts are now en route back to Earth, with their return and splashdown off the California coast scheduled for 10 April.
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