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<\/p>\nHistoric Artemis II Moon fly-by: Nature\u2019s live coverage as it happened<\/p>\n
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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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
Now they were focusing on Marie Henderson, NASA\u2019s 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<\/i>, a view of the Moon growing larger in their window. The lunar fly-by \u2014 a nearly seven-hour period when the astronauts would observe the Moon as they travelled past it \u2014 was about to start.<\/p>\n
One by one, Henderson polled the scientists for their \u2018go\u2019 or \u2019no go\u2019 signal. After she\u2019d collected them all, she reached her decision: \u201cWe are go for lunar fly-by.\u201d The tension in the room ratcheted up a little bit more.<\/p>\n
Lunar rhapsody<\/h2>\n
In the end, those hours went swimmingly. The Artemis II astronauts \u2014 Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen \u2014 pulled off a nearly flawless sequence of lunar observations. Drawing on their pre-mission training in geology and imaging<\/a>, they described, photographed and marvelled at the Moon, observing parts of its far side that no human had seen in sunlight before. <\/p>\n After a few hours, I was gently hustled out of the science-evaluation room to make space for others. So I didn\u2019t see the scientists\u2019 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 \u2018terminator\u2019, the boundary between day and night on the Moon.<\/p>\n Marie Henderson, another leader of the Artemis II science team, smiles as the astronauts express their awe of the Moon.<\/span>Credit: NASA\/Luna Posadas Nava<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/picture><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n A later news conference revealed that there were \u201caudible screams of delight\u201d in the room when Wiseman reported that the astronauts had seen multiple \u2018impact flashes\u2019, created when tiny meteorites pelted the lunar surface.<\/p>\n More observations flooded in during the remainder of the fly-by. The Artemis II crew saw mountains and cliffs. They saw features shaped like human hand prints and dinosaur footprints. Towards the end of the passage, they witnessed a total solar eclipse for nearly an hour. \u201cThere\u2019s absolutely no words to describe what we are looking at out this window,\u201d Wiseman said.<\/p>\n As the fly-by drew to a close, we journalists waited not-so-patiently to see the images the astronauts had recorded. We would have to hang on until morning. They were transmitted overnight Houston time, and NASA\u2019s image-processing wizards worked their magic in the wee hours of Tuesday to get them ready for public viewing. I talked to David Hollibaugh Baker, a NASA planetary geologist who helps to lead the archiving of the mission\u2019s data. He had been on a sleep shift for the first part of the night, and arrived at the space centre after the first images were up on the computer displays. \u201cI opened up the door, and there was the Moon,\u201d he said. \u201cMy heart was racing \u2026 I never felt that kind of rush before.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Artemis](\"https:\/\/media.nature.com\/lw767\/magazine-assets\/d41586-026-01138-y\/d41586-026-01138-y_52266004.jpg?as=webp)
The rush of imagery<\/h2>\n
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