For the first time, humans have glimpsed the entire far side of the moon with their own eyes — and their photos are beginning to come in.
In what was the most highly anticipated moment of the Artemis II mission, four astronauts flew around the moon Monday, snapping photos and making detailed observations from the window of their Orion spacecraft.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen captured a slew of photos of the moon’s rugged terrain, sprawling impact craters and vast, dark plains.
The first photo released from the flyby, shared Tuesday morning by the White House on X, shows “Earthset,” a moment captured from the lunar far side as Earth dipped out of view on the opposite edge of the moon.
The new image is a kind of re-creation of the iconic “Earthrise” photo taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. The Apollo 8 photo, however, showed Earth reemerging into view, rather than disappearing, as astronauts Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell circumnavigated the moon.
The White House also shared a spectacular photo that the Artemis II astronauts snapped of a solar eclipse from space. The eclipse occurred Monday evening, toward the end of the hourslong lunar flyby, when the sun slipped behind the moon.
The astronauts became the first people to view a solar eclipse from the moon. The new image shows a darkened moon with the sun’s outermost atmosphere, the corona, glowing around the edges.
Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen spent around seven hours taking photographs and gathering notes about surface features on the moon during the flyby. They became the first people to see the entire lunar far side, which is not visible from Earth because that part of the moon permanently faces away from our planet.
Even during the Apollo missions, astronauts couldn’t view much of the moon’s far side because of the paths and timing of their flights.
The Artemis II crew's early observations elicited celebrations from the mission's lunar science team throughout the flyby. Glover, for instance, was particularly captivated by the jagged topography along the moon’s terminator, the dividing line between its illuminated side and the side cloaked in darkness.
“Boy, I am loving the terminator,” he radioed to Mission Control. “There’s just so much magic in the terminator — the islands of light, the valleys that look like black holes. You’d fall straight to the center of the moon if you stepped in some of those. It’s just so visually captivating.”
One of the 30 science targets set out for the mission was the Orientale basin, a nearly 600-mile-wide crater that straddles the moon’s near and far sides. The 3.8-billion-year-old basin was formed when a large object smacked into the moon’s surface.
The crew members studied more recent impact craters on the moon’s surface, as well. Koch noted that these smaller pockmarks were often brighter than expected.
“What it really looks like is like a lampshade with tiny pinprick holes,” Koch said. “They’re so bright compared to the rest of the moon.”
Throughout the day, the astronauts spoke about how moving it was to see the moon up close.
“When we have that perspective and we compare it to our home of Earth, it just reminds us how much we have in common,” Koch said. “Everything we need, Earth provides. And that is somewhat of a miracle and one that you can’t truly know until you’ve had the perspective of the other.”
The four crew members spent hours marveling over the moon’s brightness, colors and surface features, and even reported seeing brown and green hues on the near side of the moon. They radioedvivid descriptions in real time to mission controllers in Houston.
The observations will be important for lunar and planetary scientists. NASA has said the Artemis II images of craters, ridges and ancient lava flows on the lunar surface could help researchers better understand how the moon — and the solar system — formed.
During the flyby, the Artemis II astronauts set a record for venturing farther from Earth than any other humans. As they swung around the moon, they flew 252,756 miles from our home planet, more than 4,100 miles farther than the Apollo 13 astronauts did in 1970 on their emergency return home.
NASA plans to publicly release the full set of moon photos taken by the Artemis II astronauts, but because of downlink limitations, the bulk will not be retrieved and processed until after the astronauts return to Earth.
Wiseman, Koch, Glover and Hansen are on their journey home. They are scheduled to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and splash down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on Friday.
