At the same time, some 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away, Chris White, the mission's lead communications officer, was nervously pacing the halls of NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, waiting for the chance to do his job again.
The team knew for over a year what Orion's lunar flyby would entail, and which shots the cameras should capture. They had sent a checklist of nearly 300 commands to Orion that morning, telling the cameras exactly what to do after the spacecraft vanished behind the moon. All that remained was to wait.
"I opened a photo — the eclipse photo — and I couldn't breathe," White said. "I was like, 'There's no way that this turned out this well on the first try.'"
Artemis II Lead INCO Chris White (right) and INCO Flight Controller Matthew Johns (left) in the White Flight Control Room at NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston on April 6. On the monitor behind, the Orion spacecraft approaches the moon for its close flyby. (Image credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz)
Brandon Specktor: In a nutshell, what was your job on the Artemis II mission?
During liftoff, I looked up from my console screen zero times to look at the live video.
CW: So, for liftoff, I was in the back, in a support room. The vibe was intense. Everybody was laser-focused on the task at hand. During simulations leading up to it, we had fake, simulated CGI views [of liftoff] to give us an idea of what we were going to see. I always thought, "Man, it's going to look so much cooler in real time." But then during liftoff, I looked up from my console screen zero times to look at the live video. So I didn't see a lot of that footage until the next day, when I had a chance to breathe.
A view from cameras on board the Orion spacecraft as the solid rocket boosters are jettisoned several minutes after liftoff. (Image credit: NASA)
BS: Let's talk about the lunar flyby. What was your experience watching along with the crew as they got closer and closer to the moon?
And the moon looked wrong, which sounds kind of crazy to say. We're so used to the way that the moon looks from our perspective here on the Earth, that when the vehicle was coming at it from an angle, you could see more of the backside of the moon. So you're in awe of it approaching and getting larger and realizing what's about to happen — but also my brain hurt trying to reconcile what I was seeing, because it didn't look correct. The shape and texture were different than what my brain expected.
The Orion spacecraft approaches the moon during its close flyby. "The moon looked wrong" from this unusual angle, White said. (Image credit: NASA)CW: It was hard to tell. The bandwidth limitations of being that far away from Earth made it hard to distinguish a lot of those finer details. But there was a moment where we looked at it and we were like, "I think we can tweak the exposure on this." It was a little too dark, and then we bumped it up a little bit. And all of a sudden, these muted grays became a little bit more brown. I was not expecting to be able to see that from our cameras.
My brain hurt trying to reconcile what I was seeing.
CW: Yeah, absolutely. Flyby was a heavily choreographed event for the Orion cameras, as well as the crew and the science community. But we had started working on that plan well over one year earlier, and we knew exactly what shots we wanted and when we wanted them. The timing of all that shifts slightly, depending on exactly when you launch. So we had a framework in place, and then we just tweaked the timing in the 24 hours leading up to the events.
Orion's cameras capture Earthset — the surreal moment when a crescent Earth disappears beyond the moon's horizon. (Image credit: NASA)
BS: How does that work during the eclipse phase, when you were out of contact?
And then, behind the moon, during the LOS, it continued to take photos at a slower pace. I think it was like once every few minutes. We had all that on a timer, basically.
CW: Luckily, we had a great optical comm pass that same night. So all those photos came down via laser to the Earth, and I saw them the next day. I didn't see them in the moment; I saw them the next day.
BS: Is that the photo that stands out most to you from the flyby?
But because the sun was behind the moon, you have the moon in the foreground in focus, the sun kind of bleeding out from behind it. The stars and the planets are all there. You can see Venus; you can see Saturn; you can see Mars. And then you have the glow of the spacecraft — it's not lit by the sun, but by the Earth — in the foreground. It was an incredible photo.
The Orion crew experienced a total solar eclipse while orbiting behind the moon. The spacecraft cameras capture the first hint of sunlight bleeding into view again as the capsule begins to reemerge. (Image credit: NASA)CW: I was pacing around the control center. The INCO team is responsible for keeping communication with the vehicle as much as we can, and there's not really much that we can do about that when you put a celestial body between us and the crew.
It wasn't until about three or four minutes after Earthrise that we started getting stable video, and then the crew called down. And that was really when I breathed a sigh of relief, once I heard voice coming down from the vehicle again.
CW: People keep asking me that. I don't know that I've had quite enough time to fully unpack the mission. But I think it's slowly sinking in that we just sent four people around the moon, literally further away from Earth than ever. And I think, not only did we change them and the flight control team from that experience, but I think we changed a lot of people's perceptions of the moon, which is awesome.
CW: I definitely still plan to be on the INCO team for Artemis III. I will not be the lead for that mission. But I definitely still plan to be on console and hope to take some even more incredible photos during that mission.
Related storiesBS: Any closing thoughts?
This was not just me and the INCO team on console. It was truly a full flight control team effort to get these.
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