From First Principles - Artemis II: Deep Dive on the Moon Flyby, Earthset, and Reentry (EP 37)

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a full deep dive on Artemis II as the crew returns from humanity’s first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years. Lester and Krishna break down the mission photo by photo, from launch and translunar injection to Earthset, Earthrise, the in-space solar eclipse, the science of lunar observations, and the skip-entry reentry profile bringing Orion home.SummaryWhy Artemis II is historic, what the crew saw on the far side of the Moon, and why this mission matters for the long-term return to the lunar surface.Why NASA relied on the Nikon D5 for deep-space photography, and what camera physics, low-light performance, and radiation tolerance have to do with getting these images home.The standout observations from the flyby: Earthset, Earthrise, a rare in-space solar eclipse, planetary alignment during eclipse, and the first crewed visual observations of meteoroid impact flashes on the Moon.How Orion’s reentry works, why Artemis II uses skip entry, what happened to Artemis I’s heat shield, and what NASA changed for the crewed return.Support the showDonate: FFPod.com/donateFollow: @FFPod on X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook

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That's where all of humanity is, right? And they're going across more than half of the Earth in order to dump all of that kinetic energy. Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking. Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD. Krishna Chowdhury, we have a very special episode for you all this week. We are awaiting the return of the Artemis II crew on Friday. They are currently on their way back from the moon,

and we will be covering all the things about this historic mission from the ground up, because this is from first principles. Artemis II just flew past the moon a few days ago, and what they saw has not been seen by human eyes ever. Okay, it's April 2026. This is pretty historic. It marks the first time that humans are back near the moon since 1972 when Apollo 17 landed. And yes, they did in fact land. The whole point of this mission was to have a highly complex and crude test flight for future operations on the moon when we're going to build a base on the moon, maybe even a nuclear reactor,

all sorts of crazy things to really start having a permanent presence on the moon. And in this episode, you know, a few days after their historic flyby, I wanted to focus on a few things. One, I wanted to give a photo by photo recap of the mission and the science that was done because the photos are just absolutely incredible. And then second, I wanted to focus on reentry, which is coming up in a few days, some of the challenges and what we should be looking forward to. Okay? So first let's start with the launch.

We started with the space launch system, which Lester created with Lego, because apparently that is the... No plural. Yeah, no plural. Lego is the plural. This is a video that was taken from a camera that was mounted on the space launch system. And if you notice, there was a lot of water that was sprayed on the launch platform. That's there just to dissipate sound. That's the primary reason.

It also absorbs heat, but one of the main things that comes out of a launch of a rocket like this is there's a lot of sound, and that sound can damage the platform, and it can also bounce back and damage the rocket. So the water is all there to absorb all of that. And all of that plume that you see, most of that is actually steam from that rocket. And I think it's really cool to see that vantage point because we didn't see this live, but now we're getting to see this. know, sort of after the data has come back. Yes. Very, very cool.

Yes. So it launched into space out of Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. And the second video that we have, we're showing the separation of the solid rocket boosters, which are these white two things on either end. It looks kind of like the space shuttle, minus the actual space shuttle. But this is how you would launch. And there, the solid rocket boosters are separating, and the main stage is still firing to get us into the high Earth orbit.

Okay. Once we do that, this was all within, that was about eight and a half minutes after launch. Okay. Okay. At about eight and a half minutes after launch is when the core stage right here

separates from the top. Okay? So the orange is what's going away. The bottom is what you're seeing is the actual core stage separating. So there's a camera up here that's looking out to the main Orion Caffe.

plus a little bit. Yes. And all of the white particulate matter is actually ice and ice particulates that have crystallized because when you load up all of the fuel, it gets really, really cold just because of PV equals NRT. You're compressing a lot of gas into high pressure inside this, so the temperature has to drop, right? Everything went really well. And now we've got the Orion spacecraft that went all the way of the moon and came right back. These are the four astronauts that did it. We've got Reed Weissman, who's the commander, Victor Glover, the pilot on the right. Christina Koch, who's the mission specialist. And toilet specialist. And yes, apparently she, dude, she must be the favorite of everyone on that, like MVP. Like if someone, if they voted MVP, it would be the one who fixed the toilet, right,

on the way up. Right. And then finally, um, Canadian Space Agency astronauts. Jeremy Hanson. He's in the corner up there. It's not because he's Canadian. He's literally bigger than everyone. And I think like that's the sort of best, this is like the best configuration for everyone to be on camera. Right. You know, so it's not because he's Canadian that they just like, oh, you get to be in the corner. Yeah, you get to be in the corner. There's like physical reasons behind it. Um, it's very, very cool. And we're going to cover all of the photos that they took and, you know, their reentry procedure. Yeah. So I, I just want to take a quick pause for show notes.

There are so many of you who may be listening to this pod for the first time. Welcome to the best science show on Earth. We are very happy to have you. My name is Lester, joined by Krishna, as you know. And this show is run by the two of us, where we really try to cover the fundamentals of science from the ground up, which is why the show is called From First Principles. To support what we do, you can like, share, comment, follow.

It really helps us get seen by more people. if you go to ffpodd.com backslash donate. There are a variety of ways that you can support the show monetarily or not monetarily. And we really do appreciate the curiosity that exists in so many of you and the love that you give us to continue to do this show. And with that, we will return to the meat and bones of why all of you are here, which is nerding out about Artemis. Yes.

So before we get into all of the photos that we're taken, you know, whenever it comes to science, and whenever it comes to experiments, we always on this show talk about what was the apparatus. What was the method by which you took the data? In this case, the data is photos. I want to focus a little bit on the cameras that were used on Artemis. Okay. Most of the photos that we see come from the Nikon D5. This is a pretty old camera. It's a traditional digital single lens reflex, so the DSLR that we know and love. It was released in 2016, so it's quite old. The crew also had the Nikon Z-9.

Yes. The difference between the two cameras is if we actually, if you were to pull up that photo again, on the left, we see the Nikon sort of like dissected. Yeah. The difference between DSLR and the Nikon Z-9 is the DSLR has a little mirror that takes the light that's coming in from the lens and part of that light goes up and is reflected up to an auto-focusing mechanism. Okay? And only about 80% of the light tops gets through to the CMOS detector at the end. So you would think that, you know, this is an old camera and it's got this mirror mechanism,

which means not all of the light is coming through. Why is NASA still using this super old camera? Nepotism or nostalgia is my guess. Yeah, it's science. It's actually, it's actually well thought out. The basic idea is that the D5, the Nikon D5, was selected because of sensor physics and extreme low light performance. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay?

First, let's get into the low light performance. The D5, the Nikon D5 is engineered to maximize high ISO. ISO is, for all the photographers out there, it's effectively one of the triangles of exposure, aperture, and ISO. it lets you control just how much light you're putting in and how high fidelity you can make your image with really, really low light, right? The Nikon D5 has an maximum ISO of 3 million. That's so crazy because we have these cameras

that I manipulate the triangle that you're talking about. We don't have 3 million. No, I don't think we would need 3 million given our studio lights, right? Right, right. If you have a podcast in the dark. Yeah, yeah, then we probably would. The Apollo era film cameras, the Hustle Bads, they had an ISO of 160. So several orders of magnitude lower. And the Nikon Z9, which don't have this mirror mechanism that just goes straight from

lens all the way to CMOS detector. Yes. Those only top out at 102,000. So from 3 million to 102,000, it's a very good reason why we would want to use this Nikon D5 body. Yeah, that makes sense. Right. Okay. So the other big thing about the Nikon D5 is it features a pretty modest 20 megapixel sensor. That's the CMOS sensor inside of it. 20 megapixels nowadays is not a lot. Back in the day when I was like, you know, getting into cameras, 20 megapixels was a lot. But that lower megapixel count, what that actually means is each of the pixels, each of the photodiodes on my CMOS sensor is larger, literally physically larger. If you were to fit more pixels in, the, each of the, each of the photodiodes on my CMOS sensor is larger, literally physically larger. If you were to fit more pixels in, the, Each of the sensors would actually be smaller.

Each of the pixels would be smaller. And what that means is you've got a greater full well capacity. So it's collecting more photons before getting saturated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. And that's huge for low-light scenarios. Right, okay? Right. You're getting more original data before you start manipulating with computational photography,

all the, I should say processing. Yeah. Because computational photography is a term of art that's specific. Mm-hmm. Just the processing. Exactly. we can get the raw data and that can have a lot higher fidelity is the idea. And the other big thing is that deep space exposes your electronics to galactic cosmic rays,

solar particles, all kinds of stuff, right? And so NASA has already used the Nikon D5 on the ISS and they know that at least it's going to work. Right. Right. It works on the ISS. And now with Artemis, we're leaving the Earth's sphere of influence. right? Oh, we're leaving the Van Allen belts. What's going to happen? What's going to happen? Right. Everyone's like, oh, what's going to happen? Well, actually, that's a concern if you have electronics.

Right. Because the Van Allen belts, which trap all of that radiation are no longer there to shield you. Right. The magnetic field, I should say, of the Earth are no longer there to shield you. So when you get out of there, now you're just, the cosmic rays are just coming. And the Earth's magnetic field isn't strong enough at that vantage point. to really perturb those galactic cosmic rays and those high energy particles. So we know that the D5 works on the ISS and we can take a gamble that perhaps they will work when we go outside of the Van Allen belts, right? We don't want to start testing new electronics equipment when we're in this high radiation space in deep space.

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While supplies last, selection varies by location. See associate or Lowe's.com for details. This is actually a really interesting point. I don't think I've ever thought about, which is, you know, when you have to go into production, as we say in software engineering. Yeah. You have a test environment, which for NASA might be the pool, it might be the desert. Or in this case, the ISS, the International Space Station, low Earth orbit, where you're in the environment that you want your outcome to happen in. And so you're trying to replicate the dynamics of that environment so that you know that when you test, you can only do so much.

Yeah. And this is one of the situations where production, there's very few people who make it to production. Yeah. Four. Four people made it to production here, right? And it's like, we better give them a camera that we know is going to work. So the astronauts also have the newer Nikon Z7 or sorry, the Z9. Yes.

But NASA was like, no, no, no. This is going to be your primary because we know it works. Yes. The low light sensitivity is good. And we just know that the sensor electronics are robust to whatever random crap you're going to be thrown at. Yes. Yes. We don't want to test new stuff on the first try.

No. No, not at all. Right. And so now let's finally get to the photographs because these were just absolutely amazing. The first set of photographs that I'm going to talk about is right after the trans lunar injection burn. Yes. So this was, Artemis did a high elliptical orbit around the Earth to check that everything was working. And then they powered up their engines, which is right down here.

Yes. Did a trans lunar injection burn. So they gained velocity and now they're going straight to the moon. I just want to pause here really quick because I just want to, when you talk about the trans lunar injection burn, just to help people understand, we touched on this briefly in our recap of Artemis. But I think it's helpful when you, what do you mean when you say that? So what I mean when I say that is, Artemis, like any other object out in space, is orbiting the Earth because it's got some velocity. And so the Earth keeps pulling on it. And as it pulls on it, the Earth pulls back.

And you're going to do some kind of orbit. Now, before the trans lunar injection burn, we had a high elliptical orbit where we went, I think something like 35,000 miles, which is like a sixth of the weight of the moon. just to test out all of the components here because this stuff hasn't been tested on manned crew expeditions. As we're returning... And we're returning because we're being pulled back to Earth by the Earth's gravity. Yeah, by the Earth's gravity.

Now, as we're returning, we're going to gain speed. When we're closest to the Earth, if we burn all of the engines that are down here, we're going to gain velocity. And when we gain velocity, that means we're going to gain kinetic energy. energy. From undergrad physics, we know that, you know, energy is always balanced. So when we gain kinetic energy here, as we move farther away, we're going to attain a higher height, right? It's like,

if we throw a baseball at a high velocity, it's going to reach a higher height. That's, I mean, that's how home runs work, right? You got to really get the sweet spot and really knock that thing out of the park. How do we do that? The velocity of the baseball, right after it hits the bat, has to be really high and the angle has to be exactly right to go all the way into the stands, which is why we don't see home runs on these new 40 mile an hour pitches that we've seen coming. Oh, I haven't heard about this. It's mostly because people can't hit it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That's probably why. Must have been the Blue Jays. I'm going to leave that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a look, it is what it is. So what was I saying? The idea is we want to attain a high velocity when we're leaving Earth. And that way we can attain a high height, height meaning a distance from the Earth.

And that's what that trans lunar injection is doing. There's engines at the back of this white part here that are going to expend all of their fuel and they're going to attain that high velocity so that we're throwing this baseball, this entire thing, all the way to the moon, and then it's going to come back. And not to be pedandi, but when you say velocity, you're just saying, we're just turning the dial to 11. Yeah. And saying, let's go as fast as possible that direction at a very specific time as we're coming back from that high elliptical orbit. Yeah. And so we're just putting a bunch of juice thrust through the back.

That's going to shoot us off at a moment of also where the Earth's gravity and how it's impacting the craft. It's going to assist us in getting more height than we otherwise would if we were just putting that amount of thrust behind us without the assistance of Earth's gravity. Yes. I mean, we're fighting Earth's gravity. Right. Is the thing, right? We use Earth's gravity to gain that velocity back. Yes.

And then now we're doing that burn to gain more velocity using the Ober Earth effect. And then we're going to get even higher. Got it. Right? That's the idea. It's like when the ball bounces back. as it's bouncing back, we like push it even more. You know?

And then it's going to go even higher. Yep. Right? That's the idea. It's kind of like if you bounced a ball on a trampoline. The trampoline is this trans lunar injection burn in some sense. Yes. You know what I mean?

I just wanted to harp on that a little bit because there has been some discussion and I think a little bit of confusion about the intersection between Earth's gravity, the craft. What does it mean that it's falling back to the earth? What do we mean by escaping that gravity? So I think that's really helpful. Yeah. And so if we go back to photo number nine, if you don't mind. Yes.

These are two photos that were taken around basically the same time, I think within a minute of the two. One shows sort of what your eyes would see, which is on the left-hand side, you've got the tiny sliver of the atmosphere where the sun is leaking through. We're in the shadow of the earth right now. We're in the shadow of the earth, and most of the earth is dark. But if you increase the exposure time and you increase the aperture, then you're going to get to see the earth in that low light because you've sort of, the ISO at this point is like, I think, 50,000, right? That's that Nikon D5 ISO, right? Yes. And I wanted to harp on this particular image a little bit longer because I think there's a few details that are really, really cool.

So let's go to some of the insets that I've prepared. If we go to the next photo, which is photo number 10, so this is on the lower left corner of that image. What we're seeing is some kind of landmass. And a lot of people were really confused. Like, oh, what part of Earth is that? That part of Earth is Europe and Africa and the Mediterranean Strait and the Gibraltar straight there upside down.

I was going to say, yeah, flip. To us, it's upside down because the Europeans conquered the world. And so north is like where Europe is. is. But I think what's cool about this photo is that it shows it's completely arbitrary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Which way is north and which way is south? We've just decided, but on the right hand side, it shows instead of a map where the earth is actually upside down, but the text is correctly like, you know, positioned. I think it's really cool exercise in like knowing, okay, actually it's completely arbitrary in space. Which way is down, which way is up?

For those who are listening, we're looking at the map and we see Libya and Algeria at the top. And Morocco. And Morocco above like Spain, Spain, Portugal, etc. Yeah. It's such a bizarre thing to see because usually we see the Mediterranean and that area, you know, turn around. But I'm just saying it's completely arbitrary.

And I think that image kind of proves that. Yeah, which is kind of cool. The other thing we see on this image is in the left-hand side we see faint glows, greenish glows. That's the Aurora in the northern hemisphere, the Aurora Borealis. If we go to the next photo, we will see the Aurora Australis, which is over the South Pole. That's where the magnetic field of the Earth is coming out, interacting with those particles. So all of the particles from the Van Allen Belt, you know, I said Van Allen Belt is a donut, right? Well, the donut has to intersect somewhere.

With the Earth somewhere, and it intersects at the North and South Magnetic poles. And when it intersects, you get the beautiful aurora northern and southern lights. In this case, we're seeing the southern lights. Yes. Right? Yes, beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. And finally, at the bottom right corner, we see a tiny glow.

I love this. Right? Coming out of the earth. Yeah. That glow in deep space is called a zodiacal light. Oh. So there is dust that is trapped in the same plane as all of the planets. Thankfully not nuclear dust, but that's not a story. No, just normal dust. And if you're really lucky as a photographer, you can observe the zodiacal light on Earth right after sunset, right before sunrise. On the right hand side we see Jupiter and Venus so that we know that the plane of the zodiac is over there, right? Because that's where the planetary plane is. And you can see the sort of glow of dust. That dust is literally just dust hanging around that never got to any. And the dust is stuff that never got to any planet.

And it's just there in our plane, but it's scattering off the sunlight, and we're seeing that. And so on the right-hand side, we see it from Earth if you have perfect conditions. And on the left-hand side, you see the zodiacal light sort of out in deep space. It's so beautiful. Just absolutely wonderful. In California, we like to try to pretend we call this golden hour, but this is above what we get as golden hour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is very...

You'd have to go way out in like Joshua Tree or something to see Zodiacal light. We have too much light pollution around us. to see this kind of stuff. That makes sense. You know? And as you get farther away from Earth, so that was right after the trans lunar injection. They were maybe an hour or two into the whole thing. As you get farther and away from Earth, you start seeing the moon, which is there in the image. And I don't know if you can see, but there's a tiny crescent in the lower left where astronauts, Glover and Jeremy Hanson, they're looking at this tiny crescent. That's the Earth. So the Earth is getting smaller and smaller in the window, and the moon is getting a little bit bigger. And at this point, I think the Moon and the Earth were the same size, even though the Moon is about a sixth of the size of the Earth. They're at this distance where now the Moon and the Earth are the same size. That's so bizarre.

It's just crazy, dude, that we're going so far. We're going so far. We're going so far compared to what we've been doing for the past 50 years. Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. It's just, I thought it was really, really cool. No, no, you love to see it. Right. And I think it's really important to kind of, that we, again, on this pod, because we talk about it from first principles, not just show the photos, but explain the camera selection, why the camera selection looks different, how it impacts what we're viewing. I think it was really important that you made the note that this is what the eye sees versus this is what we get out of the camera because it basically has boosted. stats as compared to our eyes. Yeah. Well, there's a caveat there, which I'm going to get to later, which is our eye also

has boosted stats compared to cameras. So we'll be getting to that a little bit later. I promise that was not planned, everybody. So before we move on to getting closer to the moon, I want to do a quick recap of what the Apollo astronauts saw when they got to the moon and why Artemis is so different compared to what Apollo saw. The Apollo astronauts did not see everything. They flew very close to the moon. So over here, we keep hearing about the record that was broken, right?

Artemis II is going to be the farthest humans ever in the history of ever. Yes. Okay. The reason for that is that Artemis 2 is really far away from even the moon. On the lower picture there, you're seeing where Apollo 13 was, very close to the surface, only about hundreds of miles away from the moon. Artemis 2 is thousands of miles away from the moon. It's overshooting the moon by quite a bit.

Okay? And so that's why it's so much farther. Now that gives us two advantages. Okay? The first advantage is you get to see big, big parts of the moon. Right. Right. And so what I mean by that is, if you look at what the Apollo astronauts were doing,

they didn't actually see everything. This is a map of what the Apollo astronauts saw. If you're close to the moon, you're going to run into a horizon issue. Okay. Right? Because imagine you're close to a round body. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can only look so far.

Even up here, if you go to the beach, right, you can't see because the earth is not flat. Like, you can't see all the way, right? There's going to be some limit to what you can see. Despite how high you get, if you don't get high enough to really see the entire circle, there's still going to be a horizon issue. Yes. So over here, what we're seeing is the lighter. regions are what the Apollo astronauts saw.

And you can see that the poles you can't really see because imagine you're going around the moon like this. You can't see past the horizon. Right. They just saw the middle belt. Because you're so close to the surface of the moon, only hundreds of miles. On the other hand, Artemis is going to be

pretty far away. Right. So it's going to be able to see the entire thing. And one of the cool things that was happening was, you know, this is going to be their first time. these four individuals, it's going to be the first time going around the moon. It's going to be the first time the humanity is going to be this far away. They're going to have like, you know, the course of like five hours to observe the whole thing. You've got to do dry runs.

It can't be the first time that you're seeing everything and like trying to plan, oh, point the camera here, point the camera there. So NASA very astutely had practice runs at their mission control center where on the right you see Reed Wiseman, the commander and Jeremy Hansen, with the Nikon D5 camera and the lenses that they're going to use and they're practicing what the moon will look like. They're exactly the right distance away to have the moon be how big they would see it. And they're like, okay, when we get to this part, the science team is telling them.

I need you to take photos of see that crater there. I need you take photos of that crater with high fidelity. I need you to when you get to this part, as the moon is turning around, I need you to get over here. So there's a dry run and a practice run. It's not their first time that they're like seeing this. Obviously it's different when you're up there.

Yes. But like to have that dry run is super important. That's so, that's so interesting. I love that they're giving, they're going through basically like photography tutorial class. Yeah. Which again, I think, you know,

the functions that an astronaut needs to be not only competent, but exceptional in are so orthogonal to each other. Right? You have to be, you understand. a camera, you have to be an engineer, you have to know math, you have to be able to fly. Yeah. And I know I'm being a little, I know different members of the crew are exceptional in different categories.

Yeah. But this is why a lot of space TV shows and stuff where like society is space fairing. I'm like, not this society in its current state. Yeah. Just because the level of like rigor that you need to actually commit to, to survive in space. Yeah. long term is non-trivial. Exactly.

I think that's a really good point. And there's a lot of practice involved. Yes. Right. It's not just, you're just winging it. You can't do that. Right.

When you've got five hours to do one of the greatest things that humanity has done over the past 50 years. Yes. So I thought that was really cool that they're just straight up practicing. I just also want to say that we appreciate and respect this in every other space. When athletes talk about, oh, I trained hard a day. People go to the gym, like goals, like fit goals and all this stuff. Like, clearly we know in everyday life that quote unquote what they told this in school practice makes perfect.

Yeah. Right. It's very like understandable. Yeah. And yet when we go to space, everyone just like forget. Like there's this weird thing where, like, why aren't we landing? It's like, no. We didn't practice.

Like we just, it's very simple. Like, you know, I don't. That's so true. Anyway. That's so true. Okay. So moving on. One of the things that.

I want to talk about was the far side of the moon, which I'm sorry that in the last episode, I kept saying dark side of the moon. I'm a big fan of Pink Floyd, and I think that brainworm got into my head. Also, when we don't know stuff, we call it dark, like dark matter and dark energy. Yeah, yeah, but this one was, I just like associated the Pink Floyd album to like that side, but I always met Far Side of the Moon because there's one part of the moon that we never get to see as humans on Earth because the moon rotates at the same rate that it revolves around the Earth. So, you know, my hand is pointing over here. If the moon was rotating faster than it evolves, then the moon would have a day-night cycle compared to Earth, right?

But like because the moon is rotating at the same rate, the sort of the moon goes like this, and I will only see that part. Yes. You know? And so the far side of the moon is, in this case, the back of my hand. We don't get to see that a lot. And so that was a big deal. This is a photo of Artemis 2 approaching the moon.

And you can see a stark difference between the near side of the moon, which is what we normally see, and that far side of the moon. Biggest difference is there's all these gray areas of like flat mare is what they're called. That's a moray. Yeah. I think it means C's. So maybe that's, I don't know if that has anything to do with love. No, no, it doesn't. But just being funny.

Yeah. In any case, you see these flat sort of dark gray. areas compared to the light gray that's only what you see on the far side. One of the cool things that I learned about was why is the far side so different from the near side? The near side has all of these dark gray regions. Effectively, what's happening is it's because of the Earth. Okay.

The side of the moon that is facing the Earth is going to have a greater gravitational attraction towards the Earth compared to the Earth. compared to the side that's away. What does that mean? That means that if you've got heavy elements inside the moon during its formation, they're going to be lopsided. They're going to be, especially given that tidal lock that I was telling you about, more of the heavy elements, those radioactive elements that are high up on the periodic table,

are going to be closer to the earth than they are to the far side. Because of the gravitation. Because of the gravitation. What that means is there's going to be lopsided volcanic activity. There's going to be geologic activity on the side that's facing us because the earth keeps pulling those radioactive elements. But on the other side, you're not going to get that geologic activity. That makes sense. Right?

That makes sense. And so the Maure are really these like basalt volcanic plains where you had geologic activity. And on the other side, the craters are coming in, but there's nothing. There's no lava that's outpouring to flatten everything up. And early, early in the moon's history, in the solar system history, there was bombardment, right? 3.8 billion years ago, there was this thing called late heavy bombardment. And so on the far side, you're going to get a lot of that bombardment. It's not going to get clean washed away.

This is a photo from the far side. And one of the main features that the Artemis crew was told to focus on because we never see it from our side is this giant crater that you see there. It's called a Mari Oriental, the Oriental Basin. It's a giant meteor impact with multiple rings around it. Something very cool. The initial crater that formed is no longer active. When that initial crater happened, it sort of emulsified the lunar surface, and there was ringing that happened. You can imagine ripples in the actual moon's crust.

And those ripples hardened into rings. There's an inner ring and an outer ring. Oh, that's so much. Isn't that so cool to think about? Over several hours, people have done modeling, and it takes like several hours for that ringing to happen because it's literally lava that's ringing at some point, right? It's like a wave pool, but a little slower because it's lava.

Because it's lava. Yeah, it's super viscous like molten rock. But at the end of the day, you're getting these rings from those ripples solidifying on the lunar surface. Very, very cool. So they got to the far side of the moon. The far side of the moon has a lot of craters, some of which are unnamed.

The crew decided to name two craters. I thought this was very cool. The first one was named after integrity, which is the name that they gave to their Orion capsule. So a lot of times, you know, when NASA Mission Control was talking to Orion, they'd be like integrity, how's it going, things like that.

That's because integrity is the name of this. With integrity, I'm always reminded of like that South Park episode, Integrity Farms, Integrity Farms. The like the marijuana farm that Stan does. So like it's it's a good name. But like to me, I'm just like always like, oh, so there's like integrity farms that's going around the moon. Anyways, the second crater is actually really cool. It's named after Commander Reed, a wise man's late wife who died of cancer in 2020.

This crew, the four of them have been together for a very long time, right? They've been practicing for this for a very long time. This has been something that NASA has been looking forward to. Yes. And so they knew Carol, Weisbeen. And when she died of cancer in 2020, it was obviously very unfortunate. Commander Reed, like a single father still going to the moon, you know, leaving behind his two daughters on Earth.

Like that takes cahones. Look, we saw this play out in the movie Interstellar, literally. Literally, actually. He had two kids. It wasn't two daughters. Yeah, but still. No, dude, he's literally Matthew McCona. And there's a real emotional toll.

Yeah. Especially if you're, you know, a widow. Yeah. And you're an astronaut. Yeah. Dude, that's crazy. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. But yeah.

So the crew named a crater after Carol Weissman, which is, I think, pretty cool. Shout out to the crew. That's awesome. Yeah. Kind of a high bar set for all the other dudes on Earth. But, you know, I get it. Anyway Yeah, it's great

I thought that was just a really cool gesture Yeah You know Just the human part of the story I think is just pretty awesome And it is always a part of the story I think one of the things that It's so interesting when I watch space movies

Is there's all the cool science And technical aspects But you can't have a space movie Without the human story Yeah Because it just would be a little bit empty. Yeah, yeah. The next image is the one that Commander Reed Wiseman took.

Do you have photo 18? Oh, sorry, excuse me. This is the one that's very, very famous. Oh, yeah. This is called Earth Set, taken by Commander Reed Wiseman with his Nikon D5. The D5. It's captured an image showing the crescent of the earth, setting behind the moon. Yes.

as the Orion integrity capsule goes around. Yes. You know, absolutely beautiful to think. It's a beautiful image. Right? Just staggering detail that you see on the moon on the Earth. It's a counterpart to Earth Rise from Apollo 8, which is one of the most famous photos ever taken. I think this is going to be another one of these most famous photos ever taken.

I think we need a monologue because when we had Carl Sagan around, he was phenomenal at orating these types of moments. so I'm just arbitrarily bestowing you with that responsibility. Yeah, I'll come up with something. But the next one is my favorite. And that is the one that I had predicted many, many episodes ago. Yes. Because we had gotten data about where the Orion was going to be and how far away from the moon it was going to be.

And I said, if they're that far away, then there should be an opportunity to get the moon and the Earth in the same shot, the entire moon. The entire, right. And here we see that. the entire visible part of the moon and the earth in the same shot. They have the same crescent facing the same direction because in this case the moon, the sun where all the light is coming from is up.

It's from the top of the screen. I just want to know if you're still listening and not watching this particular episode, we really encourage you to take a watch because the imagery is incredible. So what we're saying is the sun's coming in from the top, which is why the top of both spheres, Yeah, is the same crescent in the same direction. And it's just absolutely a phenomenal photo because it shows just how small Earth is compared to the big moon.

The moon is much smaller than the Earth, but here in this perspective, they're so far away that the Earth is so small. The Earth is so small that it's about the size of what the moon is to us, which means they could put up their thumb or a few fingers and cover up the entire Earth with a few fingers. Classic Cesar from Apollo 13. That's 7 billion, close to 8 billion people just like that. And there's four people behind that photo.

It's almost everybody except the people on the ISS and any classified missions. No, even the ISS is right there. It's right there. No, no, no, no. It's so close. Yeah. Everyone, the classified missions, I'm not so sure. I don't know where they are.

But everyone except for those four are in that sliver. It's just such a good. That's where all of humanity is, right? Everyone you know. Yeah. Everyone you love. Yeah. all of the wars

all of everything and so that that is by far my favorite photo that has come out of this mission and it's we covered it in our February episode when Artemis was originally

supposed to launch and I understood what you were saying but obviously I didn't visualize and kind of internalize the emotional connection to like what it feels like to see us in that context yeah it's pretty insane

And I know we've seen it kind of before, right, with the one you mentioned earlier, but this is, I'm alive for this one. Yeah. And it's like, and there was a human being behind that photo. Yes. That literally saw that out his window. Yes. Or her window. Yes.

Right. Oh, my gosh. That's quite nice. One of the cool things that they were doing on this lunar flyby, I was watching the live stream. And they were using camera shrouds to protect from the glare of the internal lights. Because you can imagine if the lights are on and I'm trying to. to take a photo through a window, then the lights are going to bounce off the window and they're going to get into the photo, right?

Yes. So they had these camera shrouds where it would cover the entire window, but it would have a hole where the lens could go through. Now, one of the funniest things was they reported that the earth from the other window was too bright. And so NASA was like, I don't know, they used a t-shirt. And they used a t-shirt to cover up the earth because the earth was coming in from the other window and ruining the photographs.

And it just goes to show that like you can't think of everything. No, you can't. You know? So when you're up there, you've got like time is running out. We're going around the moon at thousands of kilometers an hour. Yes. And time is running out. What do we do?

Okay, sure. Like just put a shirt. Like it's like stuff that I would think of. Yes. You know? Yes. On like if I did an astrophotography thing, it's like, okay, let's put a shirt around the telescope because this random light is coming through.

And they, this is after having done training on the ground for how to shoot and it's like, oh, we forgot that there's a window over there. There's a window over there and the earth is going to be exactly in the right spot that it's like coming in and like it's actually hella bright. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, for some reason. Yeah. If anyone's trying to take a photo with your iPhone, right? Like, and I mean, we all see it. Yeah, the glare and the reflection and all kinds and yeah. And if there's another, even if the photo, even if the, the, um, the light source is not in the photo frame. Right. It's going to, so one of the good ways to do it's just to put something over and like block that light, right? Okay, so finally, now that

they've had earth set, yes, because the earth is set, now they're going around the moon. Yes. And now the sun is going to set around the moon. Yes. But if the sun sets around the moon, that's a eclipse. Yes. Right? That's a solar eclipse. So you need some solar eclipse glasses. Yes. So they put on their solar eclipse glasses to watch the sun. set. And then once they're in total solar eclipse territory, which we saw in Texas, now you can remove your glasses and you can see the actual solar eclipse. So before we get into that, actually I want to show one more photo, which is the solar eclipse lasted about 54 minutes, and that's what it looks like. The sun is behind the moon. The earth is pointing up here.

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past, as the light is passing from the sun across the earth and it's bouncing off the earth. The earth is literally so bright that it is creating a crescent on the moon. It's acting like another sort of lighting light source. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When we think about in movies, right, there's like the primary light source, it's behind. But there's a secondary light from the earth that is bouncing light to the moon. Yep. We got a little hairlight. Yeah, it's called Earth shine.

This is Earth set, Earth shine. These are, I didn't. Just incredible. Incredible photographs. And there around the moon you see the Corona, which is the Sun's outer atmosphere that is spewing out solar wind and all sorts of other stuff. There's a lot of really cool heliophysics that goes on in the Corona. One of the biggest unsolved mysteries about the Sun is why is the Corona so hot. Right. It's like 2 million Kelvin, 2 million degrees Celsius.

Really shouldn't be given that the surface of the sun is only like 6,000 degrees Celsius. So why is the outer outer atmosphere the same temperature as the core when you've got the photosphere, the outer surface of the sun at like 6,000? You go from millions to 6,000 back to millions. Doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. So this is one of the things that astronomers are working on. We've got a pretty good handle on it.

It has to do with magnetic fields and things like that. like that, but it's always nice to, you know, observe and get more data. One of the things that I wanted to talk about and linger on the solar eclipse a little bit more was to try and predict where the planets should be. Right. If we take a photo of the solar eclipse, because with the solar eclipse, you're blocking out the sun, so now you can see planets that are behind the sun on the sideways. You can see the entire solar system without having the sun blind you.

Okay? So just for all my astrology, you know, people who care about planet alignments, this seems like this is a moment to lean in. Exactly. Yeah. Here we're going. How are the planets aligned around the moon when it comes to the solar eclipse from the vantage point of Artemis that's going around? Right, because we've never had this discussion before. Yeah.

Really. Yeah. Because it's never been practical. Yeah. It's never been a thing. So to do this, I wanted you, right before this episode, I had you take a photo of your Apple Watch, where the Apple Watch has a feature where you can look at where the planets are right now. Right? There's a way to, I think, is it, is it part of the safe?

Yeah. So if you have an Apple Watch right now, you probably know that you can install different watch faces on your Apple Watch. So you can have a photo, you can have a bunch of graphs about your activity, or you can have the literal position. of the planets in real time in context of where you are on Earth. Yeah, like at this moment, which is, I didn't know this until you brought this up to me earlier today. It's pretty cool, right?

And so here what we're seeing is the sun in the center, obviously. You've got Earth, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn. Yes. Okay? And from this, what I want to do is predict from your Apple Watch, where are the planets going to be in that photo of the moon,

the solar eclipse, that Artemis saw. Okay? This is, I'm so excited about this. I just want everyone to know, Christian did not tell me about this. Yeah. And so I'm very excited.

This is going to be really cool. So let's move on to the next photo where I have a bit higher fidelity photograph. Okay. The earth is where, the moon is actually where that is, where the rays are coming out. So the earth is right there.

It's kind of occluded by all the lines that I drew. But the source of all of these rays is where the moon is. Got it. We've got a center line that passes from the moon to the sun. Yes. Okay? That's the white line. In white, yes.

That is the direction you would be looking if you looked through the moon because the sun is behind the moon. Right. Based on the photos we were just looking at, which is why that life source is happening. We had the crescent on the moon from the earth, but the light, like the larger. Yeah, the larger big glow is because the sun is behind the moon. So basically, if you were to draw a line from the moon to the sun, that would be that white line. Yes. Okay?

And now let's look at the positions of the planets, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Venus. Yes. Okay? We want to ask, what is the planet that's going to be right next to the sun? You would think, naively, it would be Mercury. Yeah. Because Mercury is right next to the sun. Right.

But that's not what matters. Okay. What matters is the angle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not physical distance. Right. When it comes to the solar system, what matters is if I'm looking at the sun and I'm scanning across, what's the first thing

with the smallest angle? Yeah. So I'm looking at the sun in the center of my view and if I were to pivot and my angle and look left to the left or the right of the sun, what am I going to see first? Exactly. That's the question. And according to the positions of all of our planets, the first thing you should see is

Saturn. Which is interesting. Because Saturn is behind the sun, but it's close to our vantage point. It's almost about to pass behind the sun in the same wide. line that the moon and the sun are in. Exactly. So Saturn should be first. Right. Then it should be Mars, which is the red line. Yes. And then it should be Mercury. Right. If I were to look to the right of the sun. Yes. If I were to look to the left of the sun, I should see Venus. Got it. Okay. So do we

agree? Yes. On the right of the sun, we should see Saturn, Mars, and Mercury because that's how the angles line up. And on the left of the sun, we should see Venus. Let me check my watch. Yep, I see Saturn to the right. I see Mars to the right. Neptune is kind of further back a little bit in between the two. In between, yeah, but in this zoomed version, we don't see it. But Neptune would be in between Saturn and Mars. And then I see Venus.

I literally am looking at my Apple Watch right now. Yeah. Okay, now let's go to the next photograph. Here's the labels. Saturn, Neptune, as you were saying. Oh, yes, yes. And Mercury. I'm telling you guys, we didn't manage.

manufacture that. No. Like, I literally brought it up. This is the first time you've seen that. That's so funny. Isn't that cool though? That's incredible. Like from your Apple Watch, you can deduce positions of planets and also positions of planets on photographs from Artemis. Right. So there are people who are on the far side of the moon. They took a photo. They are able to see the planets because it was during a solar eclipse. Yes. From the vantage. point of being on the far side of the moon. And literally, I just looked at my watch and that is exactly what it looks like. Exactly. That's incredible. Isn't it cool?

It just makes sense. The whole thing, the planets, the positions, the whole thing makes sense. Yes. Yes. That was quite nice. It's pretty cool. That was quite nice. Right?

I like that. Yeah, that was... I thought you would. You were like, oh, that's what's special for you. I was like, okay. You can't never surprise me. This is quite nice. And in the next photo, we'll actually see Venus.

It's on the left. Yes. Right? It's peeking out right behind the Artemis module. So the other planets that we saw are, would be like, you know, out of frame. Yes, out of frame to the right. Yeah. Pretty cool.

This is quite nice. Right? Look, if you're not enjoying this endeavor into curiosity and discovery, I just, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, this is so. This is like the most. I've had in a long time. Yeah. In general, it's been so much happening. Yeah. And there's so much information and detail and conversation. And this is where I know

you and I both love to kind of dig in is in the substance. Yeah. Because there's headlines and oh, but like, no, but it makes sense. If you just, if you just peel away the layers a little bit and you think about it. Right. It's like, yeah, no, the thing that you saw in the Apple Watch is the thing that the astronauts saw on Artemis when they were going around the moon. It's so good. I think that was pretty cool. This is quite nice.

Okay. We've been focusing a lot on the photographs, but one thing that I don't want to leave out is the human observer. Yes. Okay? So there are a lot of recorded observations. This is a photograph of, I believe, Commander Reid Wiseman,

just looking through the... window and taking observations. They had iPads that, you know, because when you go to the, through the far side of the moon, and then the earth is no longer in view, you can no longer communicate with Earth. But that doesn't mean that you're not going to be taking observations, right? You're going to be taking photographs and you're also going to be relaying observations about what your human eye is seeing. In some cases, the human eye is worse than cameras. Yes. But in a lot of other cases, the human eye is actually vastly superior to any digital camera that we have for deep space observation.

The digital sensor has strong limitations. It has to do with the response. The digital camera uses CMOS sensors. Yes. And what it's doing is literally just counting photons. And the photons have to excite the silicon atoms, the metal oxide silicon, that's what moss is. Metal oxide silicon.

It has to excite the atoms in the sensor to then produce some kind of digital fingerprint that we then record as data. The human eye uses rods and cones in our retina. The rods are really highly sensitive to low light, and the cones are really high-resolution color vision. The big difference, though, comes in their response curve. This is the input-output relationship between how much light is coming in

and what you perceive. For a digital camera, how much light is coming in, is exactly what you would perceive. If I have 10 photons that come in or 100 photons that come in, I would sense 10 times the brightness, 100 times the brightness, right? Human eye has a logarithmic response.

Here's what that means. In the blue is your linear curve from a camera. If I have 20% of light coming in, I get 20% response. 50% light coming in, 50% response. The human eye is a logarithmic curve, meaning lower light has a much higher output.

Yes. Right. So we are really highly sensitive to that low light condition. Shout out evolution. Shout out evolution, especially when it comes to going around the moon, being in the eclipse. The corona is going to be this faint glow around the moon. The human observer can see a lot more in real time than a camera ever could. Because we've had a billion ears and a camera, what? 100 tops.

Right, right. It might get quite nice. It might get quite nice. But so far, not yet. Not yet. This is one of those things where biology is just beating hardware. I mean, it's such an interesting, because we talked about it earlier about this advantage of having, what was it, $3 million, $1 million, $3 million, ISO.

On the D of the Nikon. But even then. Right. And that's kind of the, you know, there's a jenisei qua, right, about the meat sacks that we're in. Yeah. And our ability to perceive through our core senses, not through how we are able to intuit, like in our internal monologue and cognition, but literally just through the input sensors of our physical body. Yeah. Those input sensors are quite nice. Eyes are quite nice. Maybe the meat fingers could be a little bit better. Yeah, yeah, definitely.

But the eyes are just like insane. The eyes are quite nice. And the other thing you might think is like, like, okay, well, if it's just an input-output thing, what if I just like mathematically make the curve the same? Sure. Right? If the input is coming in, I could just do that. The other thing that the eye does is it operates via rapid micro-movements called saccades. Because the eye, when it's focusing, your eye is not actually perfectly still. It's doing tiny movements. What the brain is doing is integrating all of those tiny movements into this fully formed conscious experience that we have. But what that means is your signal to noise goes up like crazy because you're doing tiny little movements and taking a bunch of photographs you can think of. And then you're integrating that.

There's a stabilizer in some sense. And so if at a particular angle there's like noise, if you look just a little bit of this way, just a little bit this way, the fact that the eye is doing these saccades and there's this nonlinear integration that's happening in the brain, that's something that you can't replicate. with just like straight hardware on a camera. We have the best image stabilization of all time. Yeah, it's ridiculous, right? And that image stabilization is creating more signal to noise. Right, right? It's not actually like trying to like deal with.

Stabilize the signal almost. Yeah, yeah. It's like when we think about image stabilization with our iPhone, for example, right? Like if we're taking video and we want to upload that to Instagram, there's like internal image stabilization. But what that's actually doing is taking a really bad. sort of jittery video and trying to do the best that it can. Right. Here we're actually making it better.

Right. The sensitivity is becoming better. Yes. Which is very non-trivial. It's quite a distinct difference. It's a really important point. No, it's a really important point. And that is, you know, there's a condition that I can't remember where the eye

movement is a little, like it's above the baseline. And so it's very visible when you're, because when you look at somebody and you look at them in the eye, you can't really tell. You can't really tell. Yeah, but it's happening all the time. It's happening all the time. And it's sort of why, like, you get sort of like, you don't, you'll, you're not paying attention and you'll see something in your periff. Yeah.

And they'd be like, wait, what's that? Yeah, because, because our eyes are, and the algorithm in our brain is just so sensitive. Right. To all kinds of stuff. Our algorithm in our brain is also really sensitive to change. Right. Okay. Like, you see a static photo and then tiny bit changes.

The brain is like, what was that? And as you were saying, the observations that the crew got is the first time in history, they saw six sudden bright flashes of light on the lunar surface. Those were meteorites

that were impacting the moon. It's the first time that we've ever observed meteorites impacting the moon. They can't get that with their camera because it takes too long to, oh, I saw it, let me adjust the lens and all this stuff. But your eyes looking at that thing,

they saw bright flashes. It's the first time that we got visual confirmation, visual confirmation of meteorites striking the moon. And these things are going at like 20 kilometers per second because there's no atmosphere to slow them down. I was actually going to ask you, as part of the reason they are making contact with the surface, the no atmosphere.

Yeah, these are tiny, tiny little things. But because they're going so fast, they're going to pulverize whatever rock, there's going to be a lot of heat and a brief amount of plasma that's going to form. And that's going to release a lot of light. and you can actually see that, right? So they were seeing these flashes.

Now that's huge scientific value because, you know, if we're trying to build something on the moon, like a permanent base, we need to know what's the frequency of these guys. And we have never observed them before. So now we've got some rudimentary ballpark number. Okay, six in the time, at least six, in the time that they were on the far side when it was completely dark and they could see these flashes.

So we're going to need a meteor defense force, an MDF on the moon. Yeah, or at least like whatever has. habitat we build has to be able to withstand these really high impact, high velocity, tiny particles. And with these observations, the idea is you can, even though it wasn't from a sensor, an instrument sensor versus a human sensor, we can still pontificate on velocity and such that we can make those preparations accordingly. Exactly. even if it's not explicit or extremely precise in the measurement quality. The fact that we were able to do it at all. At all.

Now we're like, okay, we now need to think about this as an issue. Right. The other thing that the human eye is really good at is color distinction in low light. Okay? In low light, cameras are just like it's gray. And it's a little bit darker. Humans are able to figure out distinct, vibrant hues. So the astronomers, the astronauts were required.

reporting orange, brown, and green colorations. This is a photograph that's highly photoshopped. Yes. To show some of the hues that they were seeing. They had to really sort of constrain the pixels and be like, how much red is there, boost the red up as much as possible, boost the blue up as much as possible. But this is kind of what they were seeing.

And all of those distinct colors are the presence of distinct minerals. That's cool. I just so. But this is kind of what humans would see. This is, for those listening, it kind of basically looks like Earth in the top third. That's the near side of the moon. Yeah. With the Mare.

Ocean, like grass, you know, a little bit of land. And then it's just all the moon white that you think of. Yeah. If that's literally what they're seeing, that's crazy. Yeah, that's literally what they're seeing because their human eyes are so good. That's, this was also reported by the Apollo astronauts. Also fair. You know?

So this is not new. But again, it just goes to show. just how good the human eye is for this kind of stuff. And also the difference between the instruments we build to perceive the world versus our perception of the world and the delta or distance between those two things. You know, and what that means for how, because this goes back to like, how do you interpret the data? Right?

Yeah. And so this is an example of saying, hey, the camera is not how people see. Yeah. Right? Yes. And so people are like, well, why are you manipulating it after the fact? because the instrument is not a human eye. No, it's not.

And so we're trying to translate from English to French. Yeah. Right? And yeah, there might be some subtle differences, but fundamentally where you're born, what's my name, all translates. I think it's an important note that part of the reason we have to take instrument data and interpolate it is because we don't have the way to perceive it as the machine in which we got to capture the data, perceives it. Exactly. And that's why I kind of wanted to linger on this point about the human

eye and the difference between the human eye and the camera. Because I think it is a very important point. And they made it abundantly clear on the live stream. The mission control and the science team was asking them over and over, like describe what you're seeing, but put it down on the iPad. We gave you iPads. Like put it down, you know? There was this really funny part where commander, not commander, Reid Weiseman, I think it was Jeremy Hansen. was describing how the hues are changing as they change angle around the moon of these Marei, right? And the mission control was just like, you need to be a bit more descriptive here. Because we're all like waiting by baited breath and the photos are not showing.

You need to be more like, I need you to stop. Because, you know, when you're there, dude, imagine. You're seeing the moon for the first time. And if it was handsome, it's his first time. Yeah. And it's in space. I'm in space. And he's seeing the moon.

And like, you're going to be overcome with just like loss for words. Right. And mission control is like, you need to lock in, bro. Like, like, this is all we got like, this is all we got. Right. We got one flyby. Like if you, if you're seeing stuff, you need to explain stuff. And he's the actual one who actually brought up the six bright flashes.

So, you know, he's doing his job really well. I'm just saying like when you're up there. Yeah. You know, and you're kind of overwhelmed with what you're. seen. And at the same time, there's all these scientists on the ground being like, I need my data, right? I'm trying to publish, bro. You know? As per my last email. As per my last email, please provide more verbose description. You're doing great,

but like, come on. I need more. I need more. So I thought that was like a really cool, like, human moment there. And finally, one of the last ones that I want to highlight is Earth Rise, which is on the back of the moon. Yes. They see the Earth. rise, 54 minutes later. Because we saw Earth set earlier. On the other side. And now 54 minutes later, Artemis is on the other side. And there's the moon. You can see sort of ridges on the moon. And then the earth is rising as a crescent. Just absolutely incredible images. And again, I want to note, this is really high zoom. This is like they got their 300 millimeter and they're really zooming in. The earth is something that you can probably cover up with a finger or two.

Right, right, right, right, right, right. Which is important. For those, who don't work with cameras or kind of have that mental model of how it works, right? We're basically encroaching in so that the thing we're looking at looks significantly larger than where our current vantage point is. And so, you know, it just, it's incredible. I can't wait for some granola snack company to name itself Earthrise. Yeah. Oh my gosh. And put this, Because it's like NASA, so it's like probably free. Exactly. It's taxpayer money.

We paid for it. Yeah. The last photo that I want to show is from the Artemis Science team that was in Houston. They did an incredible job. They did an incredible job preparing the astronauts for their mission and then guiding the astronauts through what they wanted to look at. Like, hey, look at this. What did you mean by that? keep going, keep talking, do all those observations.

They've just done an incredible job and created a huge scientific reservoir that we're only really going to get the meat of when they get back and we're going to see all of the data that they have, you know? Right. I just want to take a moment to congratulate and thank all of those who have been in many different aspects, whether it's within NASA directly, through contractors that were sourced to provide a number of services and ultimately products related to this mission. It is, you are all unsung heroes in this story of human discovery.

And one of the endeavors we're trying to do with this show is elevate the names, faces, and voices of many of you who are doing a lot of this fundamental work. But it's not, the Grammys. It's not the Super Bowl halftime show. But it is for millions and millions of people on the planet. And we just don't have a venue that really is able to make it compete with these other things. This is so... But we're building it.

We're trying to build that because this is some of the most important... When people look back in history, whose names do they remember? They remember Galileo. they remember Newton. They remember those who at the time people were heretical, they didn't understand, they were pushing the envelope, but had the sensationalable curiosity

and were focused on doing the work. Yeah. And I'm going to get off my soapbox. And one more thing that I wanted to just comment about this photo is it's such a stark difference from the Apollo mission control. Yeah, that's a really good point. Because there's so many women in this photo.

That's a really good point. I think that's just so cool. Yes. Right? I think, you know, we have a long way to go as a society when it comes to gender equality in the sciences. Yes. But I think this shows just how far we've come that there are all these women on the science team. Yes.

On Artemis that are guiding the astronauts, what to look for. What are the questions that we want answered? What are the new questions that you are asking or the new observations that you've made that are making us ask new questions? It's just a complete night and day between mission control during Apollo, which was all men, and now, you know, quite a few women. I think that's very cool. 100%. Just a shout out. And it's huge progress.

Thank you to all of those who've supported, whether you're employed, members, families, interested third party. Like, this is a really big deal. Yeah. And as Cat Williams says, we need haters. So, you know, we're continuing to try to help people find a way to connect with these subjects. And just because they're not into it right now, that's okay. If you're not doing anything important, you don't have any haters. You guys are doing something important.

And so naturally you're going to hit people who push back on it. And that's the way the world works. That's the way the world works. be proud of the haters you know okay the final frankly we need more haters yeah yeah we're not

important enough yet yeah yeah yeah yeah we don't have enough haters although there are a few people in the comments who are like they're definitely AI that makes me feel good you know so many things that we're so good we're big science

we're paid off by NASA who's paying us I would love to be paid yo if anyone wants to pay us that would be great like I would be lovely I would love to get paid yeah that would be

great. Okay, so the final part of our segment, I want to talk about reentry, which is going to be happening on Friday. Around 5pm, I believe, is when they're going to be reentering the Earth's atmosphere and landing somewhere right off the coast of San Diego. And that's going to be

Friday, April 10th. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So atmospheric reentry, you're approaching the Earth's atmosphere and all of that energy that was put into that trans-luner injection burn has to get shed. Right. Right. Conservation of energy.

Right. In space, there's nothing. That energy hasn't gone anywhere. It's just in the motion, right? Sure, when you're at the moon, you're going a bit slower, but that's because you have so much gravitational potential energy. By the time they're falling, and currently, as we record this episode,

they are falling from the moon, right? All the way from the moon back here, by the time they enter our Earth's atmosphere, they're going to have a velocity, a speed of 40,000 kilometers per hour. All almost the same as the velocity that they left to the earth with. And it's funny, I mean, the space is a vacuum, right?

Yeah, so they didn't go anywhere. There's nowhere to dissipate. Yeah, yeah. It's just in the motion. Right. And all of that motion, all of that kinetic energy has to go somewhere. And so what we want to do fundamentally is dump all of that kinetic energy as heat into the atmosphere.

Right. That's the equation that we're doing. Before is kinetic energy and whatever the temperature. Which, just to be clear for those, it means just movement or motion. Like when you say kinetic energy, can you just be a little? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. When I say kinetic energy, I mean this thing, they are Ryan capsule up here, this little triangle pyramid part, is moving at 40,000 kilometers per hour.

One half mv squared, that's the kinetic energy of this guy, just on the motion of the thing. we want to slow it down so that it doesn't slam into the earth like a meteorite. Right. Okay? Right. And in order to do that,

all of that energy from the motion has to go somewhere. Whatever your thing. It could be anything. Canva helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing. It's a way to design with our magic AI tool things.

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Okay? We got to be careful, though. Okay? There's got to be a method to this madness. Right. And this is where the reentry procedure comes in. So in the next segment, we're going to talk about how long does that take? So we're actually going to start over the Indian Ocean.

If you go to photo number 33, yes. Look at how much, look at how much just real estate. Distance. The distance, yeah. Look at how much distance the reentry procedure is taking. They're entering the atmosphere somewhere over India, just south of India in the Indian Ocean. It's like a Sri Lanka area. Yeah, exactly.

going across more than half of the earth in order to dump all of that kinetic energy. The point here being, once Orion re-enters Earth's atmosphere, you know, 400,000 feet above the Earth's surface, it's going to traverse across. It's not just going to come straight down. Yeah, exactly. It's going to traverse across the surface of the Earth. And the reason, that's a proactive choice because we need to dissipate the heat. Yeah, we need to. We need to dump all that energy. And so we need a longer amount of time in order to allow that to burn off so that the vehicle can slow down enough to be able to land safely. And we need to manage that heat exactly right, right?

We need to, it's over such a long period because we don't want it to get so hot. The temperature can't get too hot. That's a really point. I mean, a meteor, right, just goes in. Right. Okay, it dumped all of that kinetic energy. But it did it over such a small amount of time that the temperature gets to like, lava. You don't want that to happen here. We want to do it over a long enough distance and a long

enough time that the temperature is sort of managed. It's only about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Makes sense. Which only, yeah, only about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But that's kind of manageable. And this is the procedure. What we're going to do is something very different, very unique, and something that has not been done for any crude mission. It has been done for the Artemis 1, which was the precursor to the Artemis 2. That was a test drive where we had the mannequins in there. Yeah. You know,

the schedule just really quick before we continue. Artemis I was the test drive with mannequins to make sure we can go up and everything is okay. Artemis 2 now is we're going up all the way around the moon because we're scoping out a parking spot

and making sure all the systems to go that distance are working well. With humans. With humans inside are working well. Artemis 3 now is going to be testing the docking procedure. It's going to be closer to Earth. It's less about going around the moon

for Artemis 3. And there's a little bit of change up recently after the rescheduling and funding stuff and all these other things. And so that's just, we're making sure we can park and do all this stuff and the dock, redock is all good. Artemis 4 then is now we're going. Yeah. And we're going to land.

Yep. And then 5 and beyond is going to be building the neighborhood, the establishment of a permanent lunar presence. Again, funding agreeable. But I just wanted to quickly recap what the. schedule is in relation to this point. No, that's very good. And the reentry procedure here is going to be very different. Yes. It was the point with this image. Because usually when we reenter like Apollo or like the ISS, when they reenter, it's just one thing. You just slow down, slow down, slow down. You have a nice

little shallow angle that like lets you burn off that heat and then you come come back. Now, reentering from the moon is very different from reentering from the ISS because the ISS you're not moving that fast. Right. Right. Here you went all the way to the moon and back. You're moving real fast. You're moving real fast. So you got a lot more energy to dump. They're doing a skip entry sequence. What this means is you're going to come along and it's, have you ever done skipping stones like rocks where you like throw a rock and the rock skips over the water? Yes. What's happening is you do it at a shallow enough angle where the sort of surface tension or the the rebound force from the water is going to give you an upward velocity and let you skip over the water.

We're doing the same thing with the Earth, with the Earth's atmosphere. We're skipping over the Earth's atmosphere first to reduce velocity. It's a twofold thing. Once you reduce velocity, you also have time for the capsule to cool down before you try again. So that's that skip entry sequence. And we've got a few videos from Artemis 1 that actually show this maneuver. So this is from Artemis 1. We've got a camera up here that's looking backwards.

Yes. Or sorry, upwards. So, you know, the Artemis 1 capsule is coming like this, and the camera is looking in the opposite direction. Yes. And here you can see the Earth is moving, moving underneath. Yes. The speed there is 39,000 kilometers per hour. It's moving.

Yeah, that thing is moving. And here you can see now, it's entering the Earth's atmosphere. This is the first entry. Yes. And all of that heat from the friction of the Earth's atmosphere is creating like a plasma bubble above the Artemis, like up here. Yes. You know, it's like all of the heat is down here as it's moving through and it's creating a plasma bubble behind it in its wake. Yes.

And the thing is getting hot. That is so incredible. That thing is getting real hot. As just as a camera and gearhead guy, I'm loving this. This is just so cool. Because I'm just, there's, there's so much hardware engineering that goes into being able to even pull off the, like, and I know we're sort of coming from, but like, there's the intensity of that environment. Yeah. And the ability to protect the craft in that high intensity environment is unbelievable. It's just unbelievable, right? And here you can also, one of the meters there shows that it's zero G's because you're, you're just free-falling. So in free fall, it's zero G's.

But as you start slowing down, the Gs start going up and up. And when you say G's, what do you mean? In G's, what I mean is like the effective acceleration. Like you're starting to feel your own weight. Yeah. If you slow down a lot, the Gs go up. We want to also minimize the amount of Gs because when Apollo did it just a single, just a single re-entry, the amount of Gs was exceptionally high.

We want to also lower the amount of G. So that's another reason why we're doing the skip entry. Okay? So this is that first skip. Yes. Okay? Now the second skip, what we'll do is we'll take our aircraft and we will rotate it. Okay.

Okay. So this is after the first skip. And you can also see the speed has reduced down to 26,000 kilometers per hour. So we've already dumped a lot of kinetic energy in that first skip. Now we turn. Yeah, we're rotating. We're rotating. We're rotating.

we do a role about the spacecraft. And once that roll is finished, again, we're free falling. So we've done the skip. We're coming back. And now we're back into reentering the Earth's atmosphere. Again, this is Artemis 1. We've already done this and we've tested it.

And this skip reentry does work. Yes. Okay? Yes. Now, it's not completely foolproof. Okay? Artemis 1 had a few issues. Okay.

And the NASA administrator, Isaacman. Isaacman, did in fact allude to that issue. Yes. The next photo shows exactly what he's talking about. Yes. Okay? This is the heat shield from Artemis 1. And what we can see is that this heat shield is covered by something called the avocat.

it's an ablative thermal protection material. It's like the tiles on the back of the space shuttle, things like that. It's there to absorb a lot of heat and make sure that, you know, nothing burns up. What ended up happening with Artemis I was there were about 100 locations where the avocat experienced severe spalling, meaning chunks were sort of fractured and broke away. The root cause is that the heat shield didn't maintain a high enough to. temperature to fully melt and become porous. It's designed to do that, but it wasn't maintaining a high enough temperature to do that.

And so the solution now with Artemis 2, because it's got the same heat shield, the engineers have modified that reentry procedure to steepen the angle, not make it more shallow, actually steepen it to get it up to that high temperature so that it doesn't blow off. It's actually designed to melt. And that's what they're doing with Artemis 2. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It hasn't been tested before, this steeper angle of entry. And so in a recent press conference, the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, like, talked about that a little bit.

Yes. And I did see that. Yeah, yeah. And it was like, you know, he said that I know that we've done all of the necessary calculations. He was totally backing the team. Yes. Multiple times. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was like, these are my guys. Yeah. We got it. but he did have a sober tone about and I think part of it was playing with you know he's working in a dynamic where NASA's being systemically defunded

for other things and he made an homage or a reference point to being hardware rich which his quote that he kept talking about. That was a good one. That was a good quote. For you know the private space company is like SpaceX. He's like look back in the Apollo

era, if we were to fabricate something and it didn't work, we would throw it out and just fab a new one because we, you know, we had, we had whatever the percent of their GDP going towards this. So, you know, we were 2%. So we were hardware rich, meaning that we just had the money to spend. And so did this private companies like SpaceX. They have the money to say, if this doesn't work, he made a reference to a launch he was working on with SpaceX where something wasn't working and they just didn't even diagnose it. Yeah. They just replaced it with another thing to get the launch off in time and then afterwards when they diagnosed it, it failed getting into orbit.

But his point was just that that's not where we are as an organization right now with NASA. And so, and he was very just very matter of fact about it. But we did the work and we figured out how to make it work. But he was, I think, subtly effectively saying we're not being funded at a degree that we can have the necessary, you know, confidence to be able to do these things.

We have to be clever. and frugal's not the white word, but just resourceful. Resourceful, yeah. And I think, I mean, it was really cool to see the transparency. Yeah, 100%. I thought that was quite cool. It was great. Yeah, because I'm looking forward to the reentry.

I'm sure the engineers have done the work. This new angle is going to be good. And we will see them soon on Friday evening off the coast of sunny Southern California. You know? Yes. And I just, you know, one last sort of good night and good luck and God bless to the crew. Yeah. I think like you mentioned earlier, you can only plan for so much.

But if there is any team on the planet that is anal retentive about details, it's the NASA team. It's the NASA team and it's the Artemis team. I'm really looking forward to watching the reentry. the integrity capsule is going to do an amazing job. They're going to be right over the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Navy is going to go pick them up, give them an Uber ride. Off the coast of San Diego, same place. Those UAPs are up.

Maybe the TikToks will come and watch. Oh, they're going back to the moon, guys. We got to get reactivated. That's why we went away. We thought you guys were coming to space. And then you kind of stopped. So, you know, that's why we stopped kind of popping up. Yeah.

Yeah. So I'm really looking forward to it. Best of luck to the crew. Absolutely. We will watch it in two days' time. And I can't wait to keep covering NASA, keep covering the Artemis mission. You know, Artemis 3 is going to be going up, I think, next year. Yes. With that docking and all that stuff. I can't wait for Artemis 4, landing on the moon. Artemis 4 is about to be fire. Yeah, that's going to be great.

Artemis 4. And hopefully by then we'll have the clock to actually be in Cape Canaveral. Yeah. So also, yeah, NASA, if someone in your content team, hey, if you guys like our coverage, yeah, we're trying. Look at the production value. Yeah, look at the Lego that we made. I know we did. This is great branding. This is great product placement. Clearly, the scientific knowledge and detail is top notch. And so we are available and open. We are hitting our corrections section, which we already touched on earlier from our social clips in. Yeah, there's a, there's. There's. There's. only one correction that I want to make, which is I meant far side, not dark side. Darkside of the

moon is one of the greatest albums of all time by Pink Floyd, but is not the correct scientific term. The scientific term is the far side of the moon because of that title locking that I talked about earlier in the episode. So sorry for any confusion. With that, we will wrap up. This episode is, it was, I think, the most episode we might have had yet. Yeah, that's a good one. I'm just so, you know, I'm just so excited about all this.

I've been obsessed with space since I was a kid. And I always used to look back at the like the Apollo era being like, I wish I grew up then. Because there's just this like, there is this like bigger than us thing that at the time was mired in geopolitical conflict. Now it's sort of no longer the frontier for geopolitics. and so it's purely exploration and curiosity until someone starts manipulating the stuff on the moon. Yeah.

And then it's going to start back up again. Shout out for them again. Also, Apple, you guys did for All Mankind Season 5 promo? No call? Y'all didn't call? That's unbelievable. I've been promoing you guys all year. Yeah.

I'm going to have a conversation with agents. No, but I am Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Chowdhury. It's been an incredible week as we've seen this transpire. By the time you listen to this episode, we will have known or be close to the reentry. So be sure to take a listen. We really appreciate you all again. If you are listening at this point in the podcast, you are a zealot. You are an FFP zealot. You are a core part of our ultras. We greatly appreciate you. Please like, share, comment. Five-star review, if you're listening to this as a podcast, it's one of the best ways to help us get this to more people. We will see you all next week. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Levato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th.

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