Shot on iPhone: One Small Step for Man, One Giant Zoom for Apple
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Yesterday marked a giant leap for both mankind and the iPhone, as both travelled farther from Earth than ever before. The Artemis II lunar flyby mission — the first crewed trip back to Earth’s satellite in over 53 years — reached the far side of the Moon at a record-breaking 252,756 miles out and took at least one iPhone 17 Pro Max along for the ride.
The addition of four iPhones to the mission payload wasn’t simply a matter of the astronauts toting their personal devices. NASA sends nothing up without it being strictly cleared for the rigors of space travel, and consumer electronics were only recently added to that list when NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman greenlit personal smartphones to be carried by astronauts.
We’ve already seen some stunning images sent back from the crew’s iPhones, but now Mission Commander Reid Wiseman has upped the ante by showing off an actual photo of the lunar surface captured on an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Wiseman hasn’t actually sent the photo back yet, but he showed it off during a livestream of the mission, confirming that he’d captured it with the 8x zoom. Mission Control later added that it specifically shows the Chebyshev crater.
If that’s not the ultimate “Shot on iPhone” context winner, we don’t know what is. Of course, most of us couldn’t even afford the roaming charges to take an iPhone to the Moon, much less the travel expenses, so it’s not exactly a fair fight.
At a moment like this, it’s hard to resist poking a bit of fun at Samsung’s infamous attempts to show off the then-new 200X “Space Zoom” on its Galaxy Ultra S23 by faking close-ups of the Moon, using computational photography to fill in the missing details on any picture that looked like the Moon — even an intentionally blurred photo from a computer screen. It’s fair to say the iPhone 17 Pro Max has a massive advantage by getting around 250,000 miles closer to the Moon than any Samsung phone ever has. Even so, it’s a fun and ironic twist that the iPhone got the better “Moon shot” first.
Still, as great as the iPhone 17 Pro Max is, the Artemis crew has plenty of other heavy-duty photographic equipment at their disposal, including a Nikon D5 and Nikon Z9, both of which were used to capture the featured Moon and other spatial photos on NASA’s Flickr photostream. While there are also plenty of iPhone shots in the mix, those seem to be confined to selfies and other in-cabin photography of the crew.
As much of a first as this is for Apple products, the iPhones in the Artemis II capsule aren’t being used for anything that even vaguely resembles mission-critical operations. Although the astronauts and other NASA officials have commented on how well they’re holding up in space, they still can’t compare to the high-tech avionics and communication systems that have been hardened against even the most extreme conditions. On this mission, the iPhones are little more than fun add-ons. But who knows? The iPhone has blazed a new trail by being on this mission at all, and it’s not too hard to imagine the day when it might become cleared to do a lot more than letting astronauts take selfies and pass the time playing Block Bash.
