April 6, 2026
4 min read
Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAmNASA’s Artemis II crew experience total solar eclipse from space
From the perspective of the Orion capsule, the moon will fully block the sun’s disk for nearly an hour
A total solar eclipse as seen from Oregon in 2017. The eclipse Artemis II sees will not look like this.
NASA has launched four astronauts on a pioneering journey around the moon—the Artemis II mission. Follow our coverage here.
Most people never get to experience a total solar eclipse, when the moon blots out the disk of the sun and reveals its fiery outermost atmospheric layer, or corona.
But astronauts are not most people, so perhaps it’s only fitting that the four crew members of NASA’s Artemis II mission are being treated to a spectacle no human has ever experienced before—a total solar eclipse as seen from just a few thousand miles above the moon.
“Seconds after the sun set behind the moon, you can see Earthshine,” NASA astronaut Victor Glover told Mission Control, calling the moon “a black orb.” “Earth’s so bright out there.”
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An image from the tip of one of Orion’s solar arrays as the capsule approaches a total solar eclipse.
And this won’t be like a typical terrestrial total solar eclipse. As seen from the mission’s Orion spacecraft, the moon will entirely hide our star for most of the eclipse’s duration, making this event unfold very differently from those on Earth. “It’s a really unique way to view an eclipse,” says Kelsey Young, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and lunar science lead for the Artemis II mission at the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.
From Earth, total solar eclipses are spectacular thanks to a cosmic coincidence: even though the sun is about 400 times larger than the moon, the two appear about the same size in our skies because the sun is also about 400 times farther away than our natural satellite. When the two bodies align in our skies, the moon blocks the entire visible disk of the sun, allowing its wispy or corona to shine for a few minutes.
But what will the Artemis II crew—NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Glover, and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen—experience during their unique in-flight eclipse?
Perhaps the starkest difference will be how long the entire event will take to unfold. Even the buildup is lengthy: Artemis II’s total eclipse begins as the dramatic culmination of about six hours of intensive scientific observations of the moon by the crew. On Earth, lucky eclipse watchers experience a few minutes of totality, when the sun’s disk will be fully blocked by the moon. Inside Orion, totality will last an incredible 57 minutes, from 8:35 P.M. EDT until 9:32 P.M. EDT.
(Before and after totality, when any portion of the sun’s disk is visible, eclipse chasers on the Earth and in space alike must use special eclipse glasses to protect their eyes. The crew received a reminder about this necessity during the brief call with Young before flyby operations began.)
For a few minutes at each end of that window, the moon’s edge will appear to align with that of the sun, blotting out the star’s fierce light and revealing the wispy corona off to one side. This will be the crew’s chance to spot coronal features such as streamers and plumes, which can help scientists understand the activity of the sun’s magnetic field.
The astronauts will also look for dust lofted off the moon’s surface and silhouetted against the faint coronal light. Absent erosion from water and wind, lunar dust is composed of tiny, sharp, glassy fragments of rock that the sun’s radiation can electrostatically charge, lifting the fragments away from the surface. That means moon dust is hazardous to humans and machinery alike and tends to get everywhere, so understanding the dust and its levitation is a top priority for facilitating future exploration of the lunar surface. A few Apollo astronauts reported seeing lofted dust from orbit, so NASA is hoping the Artemis II crew may have the same luck.
“Not a lot of Apollo crew members saw that, so while we have guesses, we’re just looking forward to hearing what the crew can tell us,” Young tells Scientific American. “We don’t know what they will see.”
Between the so-called sunset and sunrise of the eclipse, the astronauts will enjoy a long stretch when the sun will be fully blocked from view. “They’re going to be able to see a beautiful night sky,” Young says. During this period, the crew will peer at the moon to determine whether they can detect earthshine, the faint light reflected off our planet onto the lunar surface. The astronauts will also turn their cameras to the cosmos at large: Venus, Mars, Saturn and Mercury will all be visible, Young says, as will be a range of constellations.
Throughout the eclipse, the astronauts will search for a second type of dust as well, this time in the form of zodiacal light, which is caused by sunlight reflecting off interplanetary dust. Such light was on display in an early image of Earth that was shared by the Artemis II crew, but scientists are hoping for additional observations as well.
There had been hopes that the Artemis II crew might also be able to see Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) during the eclipse, but the dirty ice ball didn’t survive its close approach of the sun on April 4.
Although the Artemis II crew’s solar eclipse experience will last much longer than a terrestrial one, in time, it, too, will end. Once again, the sun that sustains all of us will appear—first, its wispy corona and then the stunning brilliance of its disk.
Editor’s note (4/6/26): This is a developing news story and will be updated.
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