What Would You Do Behind The Moon?

For as reassuring as it may be to know you have a world-spanning team of geniuses overseeing your well-being, the Artemis crew has to get a little annoyed by mission control sometimes, right? They're constantly in your ear and up your butt. They're nagging you to exercise when you're trying to do science stuff. They're making you use Outlook. They're waking you from your too-rare and too-short sleep by playing music, and then cutting it off right before the chorus, which you were looking forward to hearing! What those astronauts wouldn't do for just 40 blessed, dreadful minutes of silence. Good news, then. The Orion spacecraft is nearly 250,000 miles from Earth, which you'd think would provide a little peace and quiet, but there's a whole lot of work to be done, and a whole lot of people back on the ground making sure the astronauts stick to their strict schedule. And today is a particularly loaded day. Late Sunday night, Orion entered the lunar sphere of gravitational influence, which means it's now being tugged on by the Moon more than it is by Earth. It'll use that gravity to swing around the far side of the Moon, and for about seven hours, they'll be close enough to undertake this mission's grandest visual science: detailed observations of the lunar surface. Already we're getting some cool stuff. Because Orion is hurtling toward where the Moon will be, not where it is—like a quarterback leading his receiver—they've already got a slightly different angle on the Moon than we do here on Earth, where because we are tidally locked we see the same face of the Moon all the time. At the lower left of the photo atop this post, you can clearly see the Orientale Basin, a well-defined impact crater never before seen from this angle by human eyes. "It's clear that we are not on Earth because that feature is not all visible from Earth," pilot Victor Glover said.