Posted by Alumni from The Atlantic
April 8, 2026
The most moving image to emerge from the Artemis II mission has not been a snapshot of the moon or the Earth. The camera was instead pointed at the astronauts themselves, squeezed inside their tiny capsule. Christina Koch sat in the foreground, strapped into her chair. Only parts of the other three were visible. Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian, was talking to ground control but also to an international livestream audience. Hansen said that the crew had spent part of yesterday morning looking out the window at the moon. The astronauts had seen an abundance of craters, including a few scars likely incurred about 4 billion years ago, when, during their shared childhood, the Earth and its satellite were both bombarded by asteroids. Many of the lunar dimples and round basins already have official names, but not all of them. Hansen said that the crew would like to propose a couple of new ones. Naming is a poetic act, and it can go wrong. Before Richard Nixon's 1972 announcement of a new... learn more