A Different Moon From the One We’ve Known
Galileo Galilei, one of the first people to see the moon through a telescope, described it using what he knew about the sun and the Earth. To convey the play of sunlight on craters, for example, he invoked an earthly sunrise, “when we behold the valleys, not yet flooded with light, but the mountains surrounding them on the side opposite to the Sun already ablaze with the splendour of his beams.”
You can probably conjure this vision of the moon—hold the image in your mind and transmit it off this planet and onto our shining opalescent companion. Peaks in the sun? I’ve seen that.
This week, we got a different moon—the Artemis moon. The moon captured by America’s first mission there in generations is not the moon I look for every time I step outside. It is not the moon I grew up with or the one my parents learned about during the Apollo missions.
On Monday—the moon’s day—we were introduced to a brown, battered world. Whole regions of its scarred far side did not appear a brilliant lunar white, but a much more familiar, homey hue. Mushroom, chestnut, hazel, cocoa, coffee, tea-stained, russet, brown: earth tones. Straight lines running over the moon’s surface; concentric rings that look like companion coffee-cup rings.
The new view comes from a combination of technology, orbital motion, and human nature, all of which are part of the point of the Artemis II mission. The camera quality on Artemis, let alone the ability to livestream the views, was inconceivable during the Apollo era. Film from cameras that were specially built for Apollo had to get home first, then be developed, before the images could grace the front pages of newspapers on Earth. During Artemis, we are getting at least a few of them straight from astronauts’ Instagram Stories. Many more stunning images will arrive home with the astronauts this evening, when their Orion capsule is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific, off the coast of San Diego.
The views are different from the ones decades ago because of planetary geometry. Artemis went farther past the moon than even Apollo 13, unveiling a whole new perspective on the moon-Earth system. And during Apollo, the far side was the dark side: The missions were timed so that astronauts would have daylight on the near side to do their work. But that didn’t matter for this mission, which is why the Artemis crew was able to describe areas of the moon that no human eyes had ever seen before. Scientists made a list of key surface features that they wanted the astronauts to scrutinize.
This moon is three-dimensional. It is being walloped by space rocks right now, and seeing its scars, boy, am I happy we have our atmosphere. Galileo wrote about the moon’s smattering of dark spots; on Artemis, the astronauts saw bright spots—newly formed impact craters and splayed ejecta—that no one before them had ever seen. They gave one on the boundary of the moon’s near and far sides a name, Carroll Crater.
When our own planet was eclipsing the sun, at least from the Artemis capsule’s point of view, the astronauts saw the agave-green milky glow of the solar atmosphere and its dust, visible around the moon. On Earth, you can sometimes see a similar phenomenon through the atmosphere, when the air reflects moonlight and the moon seems swaddled in a halo. My younger daughter’s middle name is the Turkish word for this phenomenon: ayla. I showed her the space version on Tuesday, right before bedtime.
Of all the images Artemis has taken so far, the one I cannot stop looking at is the photo of the far side of the moon: a thick crescent foregrounding a tiny, distant crescent Earth. This is our planet viewed the way we usually see our moon, and our moon the way we’ve been able to see the Earth since astronauts first orbited the planet. I have never seen the moon this way. And I have looked at it a lot. This new view was both unnerving and exhilarating. I felt—to borrow a new phrase—“moon joy.”
Mission Specialist Christina Koch felt moved by the moon, too. At one point, after the astronauts had described various features that they had previously memorized using flash cards, Koch shared her amazement in a simple phrase: “It’s a real place.”
If Galileo was the first to describe the moon’s features in detail, his contemporary and sometimes pen pal Johannes Kepler was the first person who might have understood the importance of sending us there. Kepler devoted much of his career to figuring out optics, and was arguably the first scientific thinker to articulate the difference between seeing and perceiving. To Kepler, the human mind played an active role in any act of perception. Seeing something on the moon, describing it, and composing a photograph from a very close distance is a different experience from viewing something from afar, or even seeing a close-up captured by a robotic camera. NASA, too, apparently values this distinction—enough to do this strange thing of flinging people to the moon and asking them to look around and tell us about it with metaphor and human feeling.
The first humans to go around our moon, in 1968, saw a gibbous Earth coming up over the lunar horizon. That Earthrise photo, along with the slightly later Blue Marble photo, renewed our perspective on this planet; Artemis has a chance to do the same for our moon. That brown, pockmarked rock in the foreground is ours too. What do we owe to this companion world that has shepherded our entire existence?
The crew of Integrity will carry home many different legacies. It is supposed to be the first ship in a flotilla that will carry economic development, national self-interests, and the yearning for scientific discovery to the moon. No country is likely to build industry or human habitats on the moon anytime soon, but this is what NASA leaders say they want. It is what China is planning, too.
Commander Reid Wiseman said at the Artemis launch that he hopes his mission will be forgotten, eclipsed by successive landings and even bolder crews and missions. But the pictures he took, and the way he and his crewmates described what they were seeing, should stick in our memory. The pilot, Victor Glover, describing a beam of sunlight emerging through a crater, invoked one of the most visually assertive things on Earth: “If you’ve ever seen the spotlight off the top of the Luxor at night in Las Vegas, this looks like what that wants to be when it grows up.” Koch likened fresh little craters to light shining through a pinpricked lampshade. All the earthly, human, 21st-century language we have does not convey the enormity of what they witnessed: a brand-new moon for everyone.