The White House publishes the first photo of the Earth taken by Artemis 2 from the far side of the Moon: “Humanity from the other side” | Science

The White House shared this Tuesday one of the most symbolic images of the Artemis 2 mission: a small Earth hiding on the horizon of the Moon, captured from the Orion spacecraft minutes before, this Tuesday at 0:44, Spanish peninsular time. “Humanity, from the other side” (humanity from the other side, or from the hidden side, in a slightly freer translation from English), wrote the official account of the American presidency when disseminating the photograph, taken by the astronauts of the mission at the end of their one-way trip to the Moon.

The scene comes a few hours after one of the milestones reported by NASA during the mission. As the ship enters the far side, the Earth goes behind the Moon, which gives rise to radio silence – last morning it lasted 41 minutes – which is inevitable because telecommunications waves cannot cross the satellite and reach our planet. The image, which the White House has just revealed, was captured in 1968 by the astronauts of Apollo 8—the first manned mission to the Moon—when communication was reestablished as they saw the Earth rising over the lunar horizon.

In the current Artemis 2 mission, in that section of isolation, the four astronauts contemplated regions of the hidden side never observed by humans and setting the new mark at 406,771 kilometers.

In a second message, the White House has also released an image of the total solar eclipse observed from the Orion spacecraft after having circled the Moon. The photograph shows the Moon completely obscuring the Sun in a view that, according to NASA, only the four crew members of the mission have been able to witness: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. The eclipse lasted 57 minutes, much longer than any total eclipse visible from Earth, and occurred