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Astronauts on the Artemis II mission have officially completed their lunar flyby on April 6th and are on their way home. For the mission, the crew journeyed to observe the far side of the Moon, and reached the furthest distance humans have travelled from Earth.
Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen took turns taking photos of the Moon’s surface, capturing visual information such as regolith colors, textures, and morphologies. The crew’s distance from the Moon provided more visual surface area and views of craters that have not been previously captured by the Apollo missions. While the livestream was filmed by the cameras inside and outside the Orion spacecraft, the astronauts captured photos using Nikon D5s paired with 80-400mm lenses. NASA also noted that it wanted astronauts to view and describe what the astronauts were seeing using the unaided human eye.
However, the crew still had to shield their eyes using eclipse glasses when they witnessed the first ever solar eclipse from the other side of the Moon, as the spacecraft passed behind the Moon which blocked out the Sun from their viewpoint. This was an extremely unique science opportunity for the teams to gather data about the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona.
The science conducted during this mission has been historic, but there was also a touching moment when Commander Reid Wiseman named one of the Moon's craters after his late wife, Carroll. The crew returns back to the Earth's
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