Artemis II astronauts will watch Earth sink and rise behind the moon‘s curved edge today and ride through a slow solar eclipse unlike anything anyone has seen from home.
From the windows of the Orion spacecraft, the crew will see Earth as a bright, blue orb hanging above a stark gray foreground. Sunlight reflecting off oceans, clouds, and continents will turn our planet into a luminous beacon in the blackness of deep space. As the spacecraft curves around the moon, that beacon will drift lower and finally slide behind the cratered lunar rim in a slow-motion Earthset.
Unlike a sunset on Earth, where the sun drops beneath a distant horizon, this Earthset involves the entire planet. To the astronauts, Earth will seem to glide across the sky and then vanish. In that moment, the place where everyone they know lives will disappear from view, replaced by a silent, airless world.
All of this unfolds during today’s close lunar flyby, the centerpiece of NASA‘s Artemis II mission. This swing around the lunar far side marks the climax of the 10-day spaceflight, when astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen come closest to the moon’s surface, lose contact with Earth for over 40 minutes, and experience the rare combination of Earthset, a drawn-out solar eclipse, and Earthrise in a single sweeping arc.
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