Artemis II's flashes

Artemis II flew in April 2026 and took its crew around the far side of the Moon and into its shadow, where the Moon covered the Sun for the better part of an hour. The archive's single telling has the astronauts reporting four impact flashes on the darkened surface, attributed to asteroids without seismic confirmation; a glow around the entire eclipsed Moon some ten sun-diameters wide; refractive light streamers; and a rainbow extending into the Moon's shadow. In the telling all of it is unexplained.

What is on the record

Two claimants resolve from one video on one channel: Wiseman, whose first name the file spells Reed, and Hansen, given no first name at all. No documents are in the file and the mission's own imagery, which the telling refers to, is not held here.

Outside the archive's holdings the reports are on NASA's live coverage from 6 April 2026 and in the press that followed. Commander Reid Wiseman and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen each called out flashes on the night side, on or south of the equator, and the running count rose from four in the live coverage to five or six in later accounts. The explanation of record is meteoroid impacts, which are observed from Earth routinely and which nobody expected a crew to see with their own eyes; there are no working seismometers on the Moon to confirm any single one. Hansen described the glow around the limb as easily ten diameters of the Sun, and scientists read it as sunlight on the dust cloud around the Moon together with the solar corona and zodiacal light. Pilot Victor Glover described the corona's streamers reaching towards Venus and Earth. The archive has found no public report of a rainbow. Unexplained is the telling's word; the crew and the scientists offered explanations at the time.

Why it sits where it does

Two named claimants describing one connected event is the L3 threshold, and this file clears it from a single video. The crew's observations are on the public record and the explanations of record are ordinary ones. Which flash was which impact is not resolved here.