AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Artemis II astronauts have been flying near the moon for about five hours, and the crew has just emerged from a communications blackout that lasted about 40 minutes as their capsule, called Integrity, flew around the far side of the moon. Mission Control spoke with NASA astronaut Christina Koch.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JENNI GIBBONS: Integrity, we have you loud and clear.
CHRISTINA KOCH: Houston, we have you the same, and it is so great to hear from Earth again.
CHANG: NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce has been following this mission and joins us now to talk about what the astronauts were doing as they passed behind the moon. Hi, Nell.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: Hey there.
CHANG: Hey. OK, so that must have been a really intense experience for these four astronauts to be on one side of the moon while all of us over here have been on the other side of the moon, yeah (laughter)?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Yeah, and it's an experience that not that many people have had. I mean, just the Apollo astronauts, and that was over 50 years ago, the last Apollo mission. And, you know, for mission control, it's hard because the astronauts are just unreachable. I mean, they're out there in deep space. And so for everyone, it's - you know, it's expected, but it's just a charged part of the mission, emotionally speaking.
CHANG: I know. OK, so what did they get to see while they were back there?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: So from their perspective, they got to see the Earth setting. So they saw this small crescent Earth gliding behind the moon. And they kept making science observations. So, for example, they were looking for impact flashes. Those are short flashes on the surface caused by impacts, like space rocks hitting the moon.
CHANG: Wow.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And then, right before the Earth reappeared, they were looking for what's called lofted lunar dust, so basically moon dust that's up high that you can see when it's illuminated by Earth shine. And then shortly after they saw the Earth rising over the lunar horizon, they were back in contact with mission control in Houston, and they were sending back images of the little crescent Earth they could see.
CHANG: (Laughter) Little crescent Earth, oh, my God. OK, well, another thing that happened while they were behind the moon was that they reached their farthest distance from the Earth, right?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Absolutely. They have set a new record, so over 252,000 miles from Earth, that is farther than anyone has gone before, farther than the Apollo astronauts back in the 1960s and the 1970s. And, you know, they were around, you know, 4,000 miles from the lunar surface.
CHANG: History in the making. All right, let's talk about that surface because these astronauts have been describing all the craters, all the ridges and also all the colors. Tell me about the colors on the moon.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: You might think of the moon as gray, but no, they were seeing greens and browns. Here's Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen describing one of the lunar features.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JEREMY HANSEN: The plateau is hard for me to see from this window, but that had greenish hues to me and was very unique. I didn't see anything like that anywhere else on this side of the moon. And then I see a lot of these what I would call brownish hue areas. There's a number of them.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: So his crewmates have also been describing bright areas on the moon. Let's listen again to NASA astronaut Christina Koch. She was describing small craters that are scattered all across the lunar surface, and she said they didn't look like anything she'd seen in photographs before.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KOCH: And what it really looks like is, like, a lampshade with tiny pinprick holes and the light shining through. They are so bright compared to the rest of the moon.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: They also saw some things that looked like bright white coating on the top of ridges. They said it almost looked like snow on top of a mountain.
CHANG: Well, the last big thing that they're going to see during this lunar flyby is an eclipse - right? - a solar eclipse. What will that be like, you think?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, they will see the sun slip behind the moon, but it's gonna look like a little tiny, tiny sun moving behind the moon. So it's not like a total solar eclipse back on Earth, but they will have some eclipse glasses, just like people wore here on Earth to watch an eclipse. And I imagine it will be emotionally pretty stunning, as well, just like total eclipses on Earth.
CHANG: Spectacular - that is NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce, who has been following the Artemis II mission, which is now heading back home. Thank you so much for all these updates, Nell.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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