The crew of Artemis II —Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen—return to Earth with their heads full of images that will probably accompany them for the rest of their lives. They talk about unusual colors, brief flashes in the darkness and a Moon that, seen up close, looks different from the usual image we have from Earth.
A different look at the hidden side of the Moon
When the ship returned to appear after leaving the far side of the Moon On Monday, April 6, 2026, Glover attempted to describe what he saw: “It was so bright, so bright, it looked out of place. The gray of the Moon and the black of space seemed to match together.”
Koch put it another way: The Moon became, he said, “a sponge of light” that “was reflecting light and lit up when the Earth got close enough” to the spacecraft’s field of view.
Far from the lunar gray that usually appears in textbooks, the astronauts noted that the lunar surface showed muted tones, with brown undertones. And that was not all: Wiseman and Hansen also observed at least four flashes caused by the meteoroid crash against the lunar surface, while Koch observed how small particles of the lunar regolith They seemed to rise and remain suspended due to electrostatic charges.
Glover also stopped before Ohm Crater, a formation on the far side of the Moon that left him speechless for a few seconds. “I made some correlations and mentioned that it was like seeing the Grand Canyon, where you can see different layers,” he narrated.
An eclipse not to forget
Among everything he had experienced, Wiseman chose the solar eclipse as the most difficult moment to assimilate. “In fact, right now I have chills just thinking about it, my hands are sweating,” he admitted in a press conference from space.
No wonder: with this mission, humans once again traveled around the Moon for the first time in more than half a century, and also reached a distance from Earth never before achieved by astronauts.
The mission took off on Wednesday, April 1 from Cape Canaveral aboard the Orion capsule, mounted on the Space Launch System rocket. The plan is for the capsule to land on Friday, April 10 in the Pacific, off the coast of San Diego, where the Navy ship USS John P. Murtha will wait for them.
“I will miss this”
As they prepare for return—putting away equipment, checking suits—the astronauts hint that they would prefer to extend the mission. Koch put it bluntly: although they have been sharing a small space for more than a week—and a toilet that hasn’t worked at all well—she’s not sure she’s ready to go back.
“I will miss being so close to so many people with a common purpose,” he said. “We are as close as brothers. That is a privilege we will never have again.”
Glover also doesn’t appear to have landed yet, although the Pacific Ocean is just two days away. “I haven’t even begun to absorb what we’ve been through. I’m going to be thinking and talking about all of these things for the rest of my life.”
Hansen, the Canadian of the group, summarized his experience with the forcefulness of someone who saw things “that he had never imagined.” And his conclusion is simple: “We live on a fragile planet in the void and nothingness of space. Our purpose as human beings is to find joy and lift each other up. When you see it from up here, that doesn’t change. It just confirms it.”
The return to the atmosphere, in Glover’s words, will also be “something profound”: the moment when the capsule is surrounded by plasma as it passes through the atmosphere. But that, for now, has yet to be experienced.
