For the first time in 53 years, four human beings flew around the Moon.
The Artemis II mission launched on April 1, 2026, and splashed down in the Pacific on April 10, carrying back roughly 10,000 photographs of a world we thought we understood.
We were wrong.
In this video, Cosmicus breaks down what NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen actually saw during their 7-hour flyby of the lunar far side.
From the Earthset photograph that mirrors Apollo 8's iconic Earthrise, to the 54-minute solar eclipse witnessed from deep space, to the meteoroid impacts captured on the dark side of the Moon, the Artemis II crew brought home the most detailed human-captured visual record of our nearest neighbor in over half a century.
But the real story is what those images are revealing about the lunar dichotomy, the unsolved mystery of why the near side and far side of the Moon look like 2 completely different worlds.
We dive into the competing theories, from radioactive KREEP elements to giant impact simulations, and the recent Chang'e-6 sample return findings from China that may finally point to an answer.
Almost everything you were taught about the Moon is either incomplete or wrong.
And the photographs from Artemis II have just made that impossible to ignore.
