Just as NASA expected, the Orion spacecraft has lost contact with Earth, this Tuesday at 0:44 Spanish peninsular time, “We love you, from the Moon,” declared astronaut Victor Glover, minutes before losing the radio signal. “We’ll see you on the other side,” the mission control center from Houston replied to the astronauts. At 1:25 the signal was recovered and the live video showed the unprecedented view of a small Earth emerging from behind a large Moon, on the opposite side to the one on which it had disappeared a while before. They both looked like crescent moons.
Artemis 2’s journey home has begun right in the middle of that 41-minute period of silence, during which the four Artemis 2 astronauts have seen And what’s more, at 1:02 they have reached the closest point to the Moon of their entire trip and, five minutes later, they have set the new record for the greatest distance from Earth ever reached by a human at 406,778 kilometers. of distance, which the Apollo 13 astronauts had held since 1970.
Far from being an incident, it is an inevitable consequence of traveling to the Moon. Visiting it requires going around it. And therefore, going into its hidden side to such an extent that the Earth ends up hiding behind the satellite, which makes telecommunications impossible. This had happened in all previous lunar missions, but it had never before been accompanied by the scientific milestones now achieved by Artemis 2. In addition to having been able to photograph in detail almost unexplored areas, they will experience a total solar eclipse, approximately one hour after having regained communication with our planet.
Although there will be no landing in this return of astronauts to the Moon, it is a mission of multiple “firsts” and records. Its four crew members – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen – by completely entering the far side of the Moon, have become the first people to have a complete view of that lunar hemisphere, although they will only be able to observe 21% of its surface, which is what is now illuminated. Due to failures during pre-launch testing, the mission had to be delayed
Despite this inconvenience, derived from the fact that the mission finally took off on the afternoon of April 1 from Florida (USA) – at 0:35 on the 2nd, Spanish peninsular time – the four astronauts have been the first to set their eyes on many places of scientific interest on the hidden side. “It is a 3D vision accompanied by personal experience, which will give us a much better interpretation than many images obtained by robotic probes. [que sí han fotografiado ya todas esas zonas del satélite]”said Lori Glaze, NASA associate administrator, during NASA’s last daily briefing before the lunar flyby.
This culminating phase of the mission, in which the Orion spacecraft is circling the Moon, began this Monday at 8:45 p.m. – mainland Spain time – and lasts 6 hours and 35 minutes. which does not require any maneuver to turn and return to Earth, the astronauts are being able to dedicate all that time to observing and photographing the lunar surface, focusing on a total of 35 lunar locations set by the mission’s scientific team, with which they have contact in real time. They do it in shifts, two by two: while one is photographing and the other is observing and describing what he sees, the rest of the crew is dedicated to preparing the next block and communicating with NASA’s mission control center in Houston (Texas, USA).
In 3D and as big as a ball
Observing in person the colors – greens and browns, beyond the gray that we see from Earth –, shadows and textures of the lunar surface has excited the four astronauts. This is how he explained it: “I just had an overwhelming feeling looking at the Moon, it moved me. It was a second or two in which something about the lunar landscape captured me and made it more real. The truth is that the Moon is its own body in the universe, it is not just a poster in the sky. It is a real place,” Koch said after finishing an observation block dedicated to the Eastern Sea.
That is one of the great scientific objectives of the mission, a lunar sea that has a gigantic impact crater in its center. On the Moon, Eastern looks like a bull’s-eye which, as it is between the visible and hidden sides, had never been able to be observed in its entirety—and directly—by any human. The astronauts of the Apollo missions flew so low when orbiting the Moon—just 110 kilometers above sea level—that when they crossed to the far side they could only see small fractions of its surface; and, furthermore, since they were traveling to the visible side, at that time the other side was almost completely dark.
During the central part of the flyby, those 41 minutes without communication, the spacecraft only had the lunar far side before it. Then, at a minimum distance of 6,550 kilometers above the surface of the satellite, through the windows of the Orion the astronauts saw the Moon that they were holding at arm’s length. They were seeing it in three dimensions—with all its relief and shadows—and more than 50 times larger than what the rest of humanity sees it from Earth or from the International Space Station.
In the sky of our planet and its surroundings, the Moon always appears as small as a pea. Only 24 people in all of history had seen it larger with their own eyes – without the help of binoculars or telescopes -: All of them were men, Americans and white. Now, four more astronauts—among them, a woman, a black man and a Canadian—have joined that select club of people who have seen the Moon up close and who have entered its hidden side.
