Artemis II crew describe ‘overwhelming’ emotions after soaring past the moon
Nasa’s Artemis II astronauts have described the powerful emotion they felt while soaring over the moon as they photographed impact craters, cracks and ridges and began their long journey home.
Among the eagerly awaited images captured by the crew, who worked in pairs at the Orion capsule windows, are those of the Earth rising from behind the moon, a solar eclipse and parts of the 590-mile (950km) wide Orientale impact basin that have never been observed with the naked eye.
Further images are expected to shed light on the brown, green and orange hues the astronauts reported on the greyish landscape, and possibly faint layers of moondust that may have been visible during the Earthrise.
Having swung around the far side of the moon on Monday, a manoeuvre that cut the crew’s contact with mission control for 40 minutes, the four astronauts are now hurtling back toward Earth. The quarter of a million-mile return trip is due to end in a splashdown near the coast of San Diego at 8.07pm on Friday US eastern time.
Fellow astronaut Victor Glover, the first black man to travel beyond low Earth orbit, said: “It was very moving to look out the window.
“I went straight where Christina went, and I was walking around down there on the surface, climbing and off-roading on that amazing terrain,” Glover told Nasa’s capsule command, or CapCom.
The Orion spacecraft began its journey to the moon on 1 April when it blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Nasa’s Space Launch System, the agency’s rocket for deep space missions. Onboard are the Nasa astronauts Koch, Glover and Wiseman, and the Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
In a Tuesday morning phone call with Donald Trump, who asked the astronauts whether they saw “a big difference between the far side of the moon and the near side of the moon”, Hansen said: “The gravitational pull of the earth has had a profound effect on the near side of the moon, changing all those dark mares – those patches of the moon you see from earth – it’s very different on the far side.”
Hansen added: “While you see some small patches of those mares and deep craters, it’s very much absent on that side, so that’s very neat.”
Meanwhile, in response to a question from Trump on what it was like during the 40-minute communication blackout and what the astronauts did, Glover said: “I said a little prayer, but then I had to keep rolling. I was actually recording scientific observations of the far side of the moon.”
“That is actually the time when we were the farthest from Earth and the closest to the moon and so we were really able to make some of our most detailed observations of the far side of the moon up close, so we were busy up here working really hard – and I must say, it was actually quite nice,” he added.
Describing the eclipse the crew saw, Wiseman said: “The surprise of the day, we just came out of an eclipse where the sun, moon – the entire dark moon about that big right out the window that we were watching – we could see the corona of the sun, and then we could see the planet train line up, and Mars.
“And all of us commented how excited we are to watch this nation, and this planet become a two-planet species,” he added.
Source: – www.theguardian.com