Courtesy : India Today

Upside down, rotating backwards: How Earth looks like from Moon’s South Pole

As Nasa prepares to launch the Artemis Mission to the Moon, engineers have visualised how Earth will look from its polar caps. The lunar polar caps are speculated to have a wide variety of rare-Earth metals that could be harnessed in the future to move from the Moon to Mars and beyond.

With the Artemis mission, Nasa aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.

The visualisation shows an unusual movement of the Earth and Sun as viewed from the South Pole of the Moon. The scientific visualisation studio of Nasa has compressed three months of footage into two minutes recorded through a camera placed on the rim of Shackleton Crater aimed at Earth.

Nasa said from the South Pole, it appeared that the Sun glides around the horizon, never more than 1.5 degrees above or below it, while the Earth bobs up and down, never veering far from zero-degree longitude.

“The Earth appears to be upside-down and rotating backwards. The perpetually low Sun angle produces extremely long shadows that rotate across the rugged lunar terrain,” Nasa said.

The visualisation rendered by Ernie Wright shows the Earth passing in front of the Sun, creating an eclipse in the second month. The phenomenon is known to humans as a lunar eclipse. When viewed from the Moon, it is an eclipse of the Sun.