After staring at the Moon for almost eight hours Monday, the commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission finally ran out of ways to describe what he was seeing.
“No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal,” said Reid Wiseman, the 50-year-old Navy test pilot leading the four-person crew circumnavigating the Moon. “There are no adjectives. I’m going need to invent some new ones to describe what we’re looking at outside this window.”
Live images from the Orion spacecraft showed the Moon growing larger during final approach Monday. Video from GoPro cameras outside the capsule streamed down in low-resolution format, due to limitations on bandwidth coming back from deep space, but the Artemis II astronauts were expected to downlink sharper telephoto snapshots overnight Monday into Tuesday morning.
