Space and Physics
PUBLISHED
No mission to the Moon would be complete without its own conspiracy theories. You can spend billions of dollars sending humans hundreds of thousands of miles across space and take all the photos and make all the scientific observations you like, but a small community of people will still cry "FAKE!"
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Now, thanks to a few moments from a CNN interview with the crew of Artemis II, and some people not understanding how the Solar System works, we have ourselves some Artemis II delusions.
Let's start with the silliest one. Naomi Wolf, who was suspended from X under its previous owners after tweeting out vaccine conspiracies and misinformation, posted a question about how the far side of the Moon was lit, prompting conspiracy theorists to question whether Artemis was going around the Moon at all.
Let's not beat around the bush here; it was the Sun, Dr Wolf.
Being as kind as is physically possible, we're going to say that this probably stems from people referring to the far side of the Moon as the dark side of the Moon (cheers, Pink Floyd, thanks for that).
The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, meaning its rotation speed around its own axis matches the time it takes to orbit our planet, resulting in one side always facing away from us and the other always facing towards us.
This is true of most planet-moon systems where the planet is close enough to and much larger than its moon, resulting in the smaller body's rotational speed warping until it is in sync with the moon's orbit around the larger body.
The far side, despite sometimes being called dark, receives about the same amount of sunlight as the near side.
When Artemis II was on the far side of the Moon, the Moon was in its waning gibbous phase from Earth's perspective. But go behind the Moon and you have the opposite phase, a waxing crescent moon.
"During the six-hour lunar science observation period, the Sun, Moon, and the Orion spacecraft will be aligned such that the crew will see about 20% of the Moon’s far side, the hemisphere not visible from Earth, lit by the Sun," NASA explained ahead of the observations. "Visible far-side features will include several never before seen with unaided eyes, such as the full Orientale basin, Pierazzo crater, and Ohm crater."
The image presented above as photos of the far side should have mentioned that it actually shows just some of the far side, as well as a lot of the near side, with the familiar lunar mare (the dark patches, formed in volcanic eruptions billions of years ago) still clearly visible in the photos. Either way, the reason it was lit so well was a result of our friend the Sun.
In more of an outright conspiracy theory, people tuning in to watch astronaut interviews (a bizarre way to spend time for someone who thinks they are actors in a studio on Earth) thought they saw evidence that NASA was using a green screen to fake the whole thing.
During the interview, the crew's child-designed microgravity indicator appeared to be overlaid with text, like a green screen error where somebody walks in wearing their shiny new "green screen green" top.
Of course, it's rather silly when you think about it. If you were going to make the effort of faking a whole Moon mission, and all the secrecy that would involve, you wouldn't forget to say "no blue and absolutely NO green" when choosing the microgravity indicator. This hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists from going with the idea.
But before you get too excited and fashion your own tin foil hat, what we are looking at here was an error at CNN. The broadcast was likely using chromakey overlay processing, or green screen, to overlay text, captions or graphics during the live interview. Occasionally this can cause errors, in this case sending conspiracy theorists down a rabbit hole.
The original NASA and CNN footage does not show the same error, as you have no need for a green screen when you are headed around the real, physical Moon.
