“See you on the other side.” These were pilot Jim Lovell’s last words before Apollo 8 disappeared behind the moon in the radio silence. To get into the right orbit around the moon, the main engine had to be ignited at exactly the right time, four minutes and seven seconds. And that moment occurred while the capsule was behind the moon. One mistake and three astronauts would float or crash into space forever.
On Earth it is December 24, 1968. After 34 blood-curdling minutes, Lovell speaks again. „Burn complete” he says. “Good to hear your voice”, Houston replies.
Luna 3, a Soviet satellite, took the first photographs of the far side of the moon in 1959. Jim Lovell, Frank Borman and Bill Anders were the first to see it with their own eyes.
Apollo 8 made ten orbits. Orion, the capsule of the Artemis II mission, will fly behind the moon only once, on Monday April 6 from 11:00 PM Dutch time. Orion moves into a ‘wider’ orbit about 10,000 kilometers away, meaning the passage (and radio silence) will last three hours.
The Artemis mission is mainly a test flight in preparation for new moon landings and later trips to Mars, which revolves around the physical condition of the four astronauts. However, in the meantime, they will also study the moon’s south polar region, in particular, with photos and video. In daylight.
Pink Floyd
So never mention the back dark side of the moonestablished since the eponymous Pink Floyd album from March 1973. The back is not dark, unlit. During a month it receives as much light from the sun as any other part. At the new moon, when the moon is between the Earth and the sun, its far side is in full sunlight. Then ‘our’ side is the dark side.
On April 6 the moon is approaching its last quarter. Seen from Earth. On the far side there is plenty of ‘daylight’.
Probe Luna 3 ultimately sent seventeen photos, more or less intact, to Earth
In the time in which the moon revolves once around the earth, the moon also makes exactly one revolution around its own axis. That is why the moon always shows the earth one and the same face. The back is dark only in the sense of unseen, a blind spot, luna incognita.
The Luna 3 probe, launched two years after Sputnik, with which the Soviet Union won the first race to space in 1957, took a total of 29 photos. There were eventually seventeen were sent to Earth more or less intact. Together enough for a rough ‘atlas’ of the back. Striking: on that side there are fewer and smaller ‘seas’ – relatively smooth and dark parts – and many craters and ridges.
Images of the back taken by Luna 3 in 1959.
Photos Getty Images
Moonsick
We pretty much know what the moon does to the earth. She dictates – with the sun to a lesser extent – ebb and flow. Some insects navigate by moonlight. There is evidence that the moon phase influences our sleep cycle. And the worst lunatics it used to be found, as is known, during the full moon.
But there still is not a widely accepted theory about why both sides of the moon are so different. Even after countless flights around the moon and landings samples of which were brought back to Earth – also from the back side in 2019 by the Chinese Chang’e 4 mission – it remains a mystery.
Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders later described the back as “a desolate, ravaged place.” But, he said, “it made the earth all the more beautiful.”
The eastern part of the far side of the moon. The photo was taken during the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972.
Photo NASA
Earthrise
Lovell would remember it that way: “As we continued our orbit, rays of sunlight began to illuminate the tops of the craters just sixty miles below us. Eventually, the far side was bathed in sunlight and we stared in silence as the ancient far side craters slowly rolled past beneath us. I saw the part of the moon that had been hidden from man for millions of years.”
And then the three saw what is only visible when you fly around the moon in that way: the rise of the Earth. Earthrisethe color photo that Anders made of it during their fourth revolution, was by magazine Life declared “one of the hundred photographs that changed the world.”
In 2018, exactly 50 years after his Apollo 8 flight, Bill Anders said: “We set out to explore the moon, but we discovered Earth.”
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