Behind the scenes with Artemis II’s scientists during the historic Moon fly-by

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1:20Alexandra Witze: Hi listeners, Benjamin here. It's the Friday show, and we're going to be doing another Artemis II special. And joining me is Alex Witsy, who covers all things space for nature. Alex, hi. Hi. So last time you and I spoke was just over a week ago, just after the successful launch of the Artemis II rocket. They hadn't quite yet entered their Earth orbit before jetting off to the moon. Now, we didn't say it at the time because I guess we didn't want to jinx it. But shortly after, you were about to leap on a plane and head somewhere pretty special. Tell us, where did you go? I went to Mission Control in Houston, the Houston We Have a Problem mission control place.

2:01So remarkably, Artemis II has been doing very well since we spoke. Of course, we're not done with the mission yet. But I went to Mission Control in Houston, and I had some pretty rare access to the scientists on the team as they were working it. So all of this was around the lunar flyby. So about six days into the mission, the astronauts flew around the backside of the moon. And that was kind of the main science event for Artemis II.

2:26Alexandra Witze: And tell us what it's like there, because I guess for a lot of people, their frame of reference will be videos from the 60s and what have you, of a lot of folks with sort of boom mics on and looking up at a big screen. Is it still like that, Alex? It is like that. The crowd is a lot more diverse. So it's not just, you know, white dudes with skinny ties. So we've got, you know, much broader diversity of engineers and scientists in the room. I was able to go to the overlook to that actual mission control room that you think about in all the movies, in all the footage from the Apollo days. And it looks very much like it did then.

2:57There is one addition in the mission control room, which is really important for us at Nature. Along all the sort of flight directors and all the other teams that are feeding in information, there's a desk for science. So the very first time in the main mission control room, there is a placard that says science and there is a science officer. It sounds very Star Trek-y, but there is a science officer sitting there in mission control.

3:19Alexandra Witze: I must confess, when you told me this, that this was kind of the first time, I was kind of shocked. Why now? What's changed that's put this front and centre as part of this mission? Yeah, we have to think about the Apollo days. It was very different. The reason for Apollo was very much winning the space race to the Soviets. It was very sort of military in origin with military test pilots getting going. Nobody was thinking about science until sort of the last three Apollo missions, which did have more of a science focus. But right then, they were just kind of throwing people up in spacecraft and doing what they could to keep them alive and keep them in space.

3:52This time, because there's been a little bit more of an effort to incorporate science from the start. Now, just to be totally clear, science was not the point of this mission. The point of this mission was to test the rocket, the capsule, see how well it keeps people alive in deep space. But there's been a push within NASA to at least incorporate some science along the way. And so that has led to the science officer in mission control, the kind of rooms full of scientists that I spent a lot of time in this week as they were working the mission, as they were seeing the astronauts, as they talked to the astronauts about the observations they made at the moon.

4:25Alexandra Witze: Right, because these scientists, as you say, were speaking to the four members of the crew in real time as they were approaching the moon. What sort of researchers were you talking to? What sort of flavours of science did they represent? So within the room, folks have little display flags over their computers for who they are and what they do. So there's like visualization people who are drawing up in real time what they're looking for on the surface of the moon. There's like tectonics and space environment and stuff like that. And you took some videos when you were there. And I got the sense that everyone was, of course, absolutely zoned in, but also, you know, trying to keep their excitement in.

4:59Alexandra Witze: And let's hear from one of the scientists you spoke to, Marie Henderson, who is the Artemis II science deputy lead, who you spoke to in a corridor. Now, you asked Marie what it was like to be at the moon and working with the astronauts after all the planning that's gone into the mission. There are very few words. This was the plan. This is what I was going to do with my life. And now we're here and we're doing it. And so some days it really feels surreal. But the fact that yesterday we heard them so excited about the moon, they're hopefully going to get a chance to do that today. And they're going to be even closer.

5:31And the fact that we're all going to listen to them for multiple hours and hear their joy and their excitement. And it's going to add to the science data we've collected for a long time and really build us a unique perspective.

5:43Alexandra Witze: Marie there, obviously very excited. This was before the flyby and everybody was super excited, but also super nervous because they weren't really sure what was going to happen. The mood was absolutely infectious, absolutely stressful. Every time I talked to one of these scientists, they were bubbling with what they hoped they would hear, what they hoped they would see, what they hoped the moon would be like. They'd been waiting for so long to see it and they just could not wait to get there. And in terms of what folk were hoping to see then, Marie mentions science data being collected and I know that you asked a bunch of the researchers what they were most interested in and one thing that came up a few times was a particular moon feature let's hear from Ernie Wright Artemis 2 visualization lead about that the one that everybody's really excited about is Oriental Basin this is a 660 kilometer wide impact crater you can see just barely one edge of it from the earth but they will be able to look at it from straight overhead in beautiful lighting that has enough shadows to pick out the topography of it.

6:46It's also got all the geological stuff. It's got multiple impact rings. These are rings that form during the impact like ripples on a pond, but at a huge scale. It has younger craters, which help to date it visually. It has all the things that excite scientists.

7:02Alexandra Witze: So did the team see this feature? Did they get some information? Yes, the astronauts saw the Oriental Basin, this amazing, huge geological feature that no human has ever seen with their own eyes. They saw it as they flew by. And it was amazing to hear the astronauts describing this. They got almost poetic. So Victor Glover, who's actually the pilot, he was just mesmerized with Oriental. The astronauts talked about colors within the basin, structures, shadows. I mean, just imagine this huge, it looks like a target. It's got sort of three giant concentric rings staring at you. And it was really a trip to hear the astronauts kind of geek out over this.

7:40Alexandra Witze: And of course, they had their short time where they were incommunicado with Earth. And it was a while before some of the pictures and the information that they gained on the far side of the moon came back. What else have the researchers learned at this early point in the mission, do you think? Yeah, so the astronauts reported back on a whole bunch of things. The scientists are really interested in learning about observations of the moon that only human eyes can do. So we do have orbiters around the moon. They all the time are taking pictures of the full moon, including the far side that we don't normally see by eye.

8:11So when the astronauts were going around the backside, around the far side of the moon, they were looking very much for colors, right? Because color, difference, shadows, dynamic changes as kind of the light moves across the lunar surface. that's stuff that an orbiter really just can't get, just a spacecraft with a camera taking pictures robotically. So what we heard from the astronauts were colors. We heard about greens, we heard about browns. There was a lot of talk about, wow, the moon is a lot browner than I thought. It's not just black and white. It's not just endless shades of gray. They saw browns.

8:43They saw sort of along the border between the light and dark hemispheres of the moon, craters, islands of lights, they called them. Another thing they saw that scientists were hoping they would see but really didn't think they would are these little flashes of light. They're basically impact flashes, they call them, little tiny meteorites hitting the lunar surface and causing this little burst. There was a bit of a debate about whether the astronauts were really seeing these impact flashes because they reported like six of them and they weren't really expecting to see too many at all. So the scientists came back, radioed back to space and said, hey, are you sure you're not just seeing like cosmic rays interfering with your vision?

9:17These are things that the Apollo astronauts saw as well, flashes of light in your vision because cosmic rays are hitting your eyeball. And so there was sort of a relatively long scientific discussion about what are we seeing? But no, the astronauts were pretty convinced that they were in fact seeing these impact flashes. And that's something the scientists were hoping for, but didn't really expect.

9:35Alexandra Witze: Which is interesting, right? Because I've sat here in the back garden looking at the Pursid meteor shower. And if you see something, no one else will ever see it, right? It's such an ephemeral thing. So to see potentially more than one is a huge deal. And what information might seeing these give the researchers? So we know a lot of stuff hits the moon, it's covered with craters. So just seeing some of these little flashes, these little impacts, maybe just gives you a little bit more of a sense about how frequently things pelt the lunar surface. And especially if you're building a moon base, you just need to know how big an umbrella you need to put up.

10:05Alexandra Witze: And the actual flyby itself around the moon was relatively short. We're talking in hours here. But of course, NASA have had years to prepare for this. Did you get a sense that they met the expectations? Were they happy with how it went with the information they got? I think NASA was very happy with the science observations the astronauts made. So there's a lot of discussion about like, what does a human bring to the table? You know, you can just send a spacecraft out there and look at stuff. But again, this notion of describing colors, describing shadows, really having human eyes on an object, human perceptions.

10:37I'm pretty sure the agency was pretty happy with it. I know there was a lot of public attention. There were very emotional moments in the mission. For instance, when the crew said they wanted to name an unnamed lunar crater after the lay wife of Commander Reed Wiseman. She died from cancer a few years ago at a ridiculously young age. So there was emotion, there was drama. Hearing the voices of the astronauts marvel at things as they went around the far side was beyond just the science value. Just, I think, emotionally very compelling for so many people.

11:08Alexandra Witze: And how about you, Alex? In our last chat, you described how you've been covering space for decades and how this was an important thing for you personally, right, to actually see humans going up there and are on their way back as we speak. What was it like being in the room where it happened? It was incredible. It felt very much like witnessing history. I wasn't alive for the Apollo flights. I've covered a lot of robotic missions, but really absolutely nothing prepared me for what it was like to be covering humans in deep space. We were able to witness moments like the crew talking ship to ship to other astronauts who are on the International Space Station around Earth.

11:44I was in mission control the morning of the flyby when they broadcast an audio message to the Artemis 2 astronauts. Jim Lovell, the astronaut who died last year, but who was the pilot on Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the moon. He's more famous for being commander of Apollo 13. you'll remember that he was Tom Hanks, or I should say Tom Hanks was him, in which he basically said, welcome to my old neighborhood. Don't forget to look out the window and enjoy the view.

12:12Alexandra Witze: And another thing that you and I talked about was the pictures the astronauts would take. And would there be an iconic image that kind of represented the Artemis 2 mission? Which do you think has stood out to you the most from those that you've seen? Some of the iconic images that have come down. Honestly, the first two I think that NASA dropped are the most compelling to me. One is what looks like the iconic Earthrise image from the 1968 Apollo 8 flight. Artemis II took an image, it's actually Earth set. It was as Earth was going down behind the limb of the moon, but it looks very much the same.

12:46You have this kind of gray, well, gray-brown lunar horizon and Earth suspended blue, white, very fragile on the edge of this much larger, much more barren world. And then the one that scientists just kept talking about to me was during the solar eclipse. So after the main sort of lunar flyby, the spacecraft happened to be in a position where the sun moved behind the moon as viewed from them. And so the sunlight faded and then kind of radiated outward from behind the moon's darkened disk as they saw it. And so there's this image from the eclipse that looks absolutely otherworldly. You've got this darkened moon, you've got this kind of glow around it, a lot of which is kind of sunlight scattering off dust in the solar system.

13:34You've got the planets kind of popping out, you know. There was a moment that the chief scientist said she told the astronauts as they were staring at the eclipse and they could see the planets and they said, that one's reddish. And she said to them, that's Mars. That's your future.

13:51Alexandra Witze: Finally, then, we mustn't forget the mission isn't over yet. The astronauts are hurtling back to Earth as we speak. And during the launch, we were all holding our breath. I mean, I hadn't realized that my hands were clasped together so tightly. I mean, everything seems to have gone relatively smoothly, other than the toilet not working, apparently. But there is one more very tense moment yet to come. And that is, of course, re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, which is due to happen in several hours time after the podcast has gone live. Yeah, as we're talking, that has not happened yet. This is a really important and stressful part of the mission.

14:26You know, they come screaming back to Earth, parachutes deploy, they slow down, temperatures get really high. There's a lot of discussion about the heat shields and whether that will protect them from these scorching temperatures that happen. Everybody will be watching and waiting to see if they make it home safely.

14:41Alexandra Witze: Well, agreed. Fingers crossed that everything goes well there. We'll put links to all of your stories in the podcast notes. But for the time being, Alex Whitsy, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your thoughts and experiences of mission control. Thanks for having me. A father's absence can have a serious effect on a child. Fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school and 11 times more likely to exhibit violent behavior. I'm attorney Jeffrey Leving, and I've been protecting the rights of fathers for more than 30 years. Dads, don't lose your important relationship with your children.

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