I was with Artemis II’s scientists during the Moon fly-by. Here’s what I saw

Artemis II science team members Jacob Richardson (left) and Kiarre Dumes react to the astronauts’ observations during the Moon fly-by.Credit: NASA/Luna Posadas Nava

Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas

On Monday this week, as four humans flew around the far side of the Moon, I entered the heart of the Artemis II mission’s science operations.

Historic Artemis II Moon fly-by: Nature’s live coverage as it happened

The door creaked open, and I slipped into a mesh office chair by the wall. I watched the faces of researchers I knew well: lunar scientists I’d talked to at conferences, met on field trips or followed during the days when Twitter existed. Many were women; many were early in their careers.

Now they were focusing on Marie Henderson, NASA’s deputy lunar-science lead for Artemis II. She stood at the front of the room, beneath a row of display screens that showed a countdown clock and the astronauts inside the spacecraft they had named Integrity, a view of the Moon growing larger in their window. The lunar fly-by — a nearly seven-hour period when the astronauts would observe the Moon as they travelled past it — was about to start.

One by one, Henderson polled the scientists for their ‘go’ or ’no go’ signal. After she’d collected them all, she reached her decision: “We are go for lunar fly-by.” The tension in the room ratcheted up a little bit more.

Lunar rhapsody

In the end, those hours went swimmingly. The Artemis II astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — pulled off a nearly flawless sequence of lunar observations. Drawing on their pre-mission training in geology and imaging, they described, photographed and marvelled at the Moon, observing parts of its far side that no human had seen in sunlight before.

After a few hours, I was gently hustled out of the science-evaluation room to make space for others. So I didn’t see the scientists’ faces when the astronauts reported seeing green and brown hues on the lunar surface, rather than just greys, or when Glover rhapsodized about the shadows along the ‘terminator’, the boundary between day and night on the Moon.

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