AILSA CHANG, HOST:
All right, four astronauts are about to pass behind the moon, where they will briefly lose contact with Earth. The Artemis II lunar flyby has been going on for several hours now. The crew has turned off the lights inside their spacecraft. That's to let their eyes adjust to darkness so that they can better observe the moon. They reported that the Earth was shining so bright in one window that they had to cover it with a T-shirt. (Laughter) Wow. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce is here to talk about what the astronauts are seeing through the other windows. Hi, Nell.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: Hey there.
CHANG: Hey. Wow, the Earth is blinding. I can't even imagine what that feels like. My understanding is that the astronauts are basically taking turns at the windows, is that right?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Yes, so they're doing this in shifts. So a couple of the astronauts are looking out of the windows and taking photographs. And meanwhile, the other two astronauts are taking notes and communicating with folks back on the ground, and then they switch. And at Mission Control in Houston, there's this room called the science evaluation room that's full of lunar experts who are watching all this and giving feedback to kind of maximize the science. This has all been carefully planned. The astronauts were trained on everything they might see. They used flashcards to learn all the names of the craters and landmarks. And they're seeing things that have never been seen by human eyes before, I mean, not even the Apollo astronauts because of the lighting conditions back then compared to now.
CHANG: Wow. So as you listen to the astronauts describe all these lunar features, what stands out to you?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: One thing is just the descriptions of the color. One of the astronauts remarked that the more they look at the moon, the more brown it seems.
CHANG: Wow.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And there's green, too.
CHANG: Really?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: For example, here's Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen describing one feature.
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JEREMY HANSEN: The plateau is hard for me to see from this window, but that had greenish hues to me, and it was very unique. I didn't see anything like that anywhere else on this side of the moon. And then I see a lot of these what I would call brownish hue areas. There's a number of them.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: So colors...
CHANG: OK, we have to stop saying the moon looks like cheese then.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's right. Exactly. It's not all gray, right?
CHANG: (Laughter) Right.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: So the color can tell scientists a lot about the minerals. And NASA has said that human eyes are actually much better at picking up on subtle colors than, say, like, an orbiting space probe would be.
CHANG: OK, so beyond colors, what else is the team looking for?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: So they're getting all these different views as they fly by. The light changes a little bit all the time. And so they're able to get better, you know, senses of the landscape. Like, NASA astronaut Victor Glover took time to describe one crater basin in a lot of detail. It had these rings and ridges, and he said they looked like they'd been dusted with chalk.
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VICTOR GLOVER: Or maybe dusted with snow. If this was the Earth, I would say there was snow dumped on some of the ridges on the interior of the rings.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: But it's not snow, needless to say.
CHANG: (Laughter) That is pretty descriptive.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: So they've definitely practiced a lot, and they've seen tons of images of the moon. So if something looks different or unusual, they know to highlight it. And, you know, they really get creative. Like, here's NASA astronaut Christina Koch. She was sort of trying to describe a bunch of little, tiny, fresh craters that are scattered all over the place.
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CHRISTINA KOCH: And what it really looks like is, like, a lamp shade with tiny pinprick holes and the light shining through. They are so bright compared to the rest of the moon.
CHANG: OK, so, Nell, in a little bit the capsule's going to slip around the moon, and communications will be lost, right? Like, how long will the astronauts be out of contact with Earth?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: For about 40 minutes, so that's going to be a little bit of a dramatic wait.
CHANG: Yeah.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And while they're out of contact, they'll reach their maximum distance from Earth - over 252,000 miles, a new record. But when they come back around, there'll still be science to do. They're going to get to see a kind of solar eclipse. They'll see the sun pass behind the moon, and they'll be taking even more pictures.
CHANG: More pictures - well, we cannot wait to see those pictures. That is NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce. Thank you so much, Nell, for this update and keep us posted.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: I will. Thanks.
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