Artemis II captures an ‘Earthset’ and stunning views of the Moon
On 6 April, the crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission reached 406,771 kilometers from Earth, the farthest humans have ever ventured from our home planet. Flying with experiments tracking the health effects of deep space radiation, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Vincent Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen also became the first humans to see certain parts of the Moon in full with the naked eye and photograph them directly.
As their spacecraft Integrity whisked around the Moon, coming within 6545 kilometers of the lunar surface, the crew witnessed the flashes of several meteoroid impacts on the Moon’s dark side, an “Earthset” foregrounded by the Moon, and a solar eclipse. “Something that just shocked me … is just the three-dimensionality of it,” Hansen said of the Moon after observing it out of a spacecraft window. “It really just bent your mind. It was an extraordinary human experience.”