- Astronauts take photographs to document the journey.
- The crew sees the far side of the Moon from a new perspective.
- The mission could take humans further than ever before.
HOUSTON: The Artemis astronauts were preparing Saturday for their long-awaited lunar flyby, including reviewing the surface features they must analyze and photograph during their time orbiting the Moon.
Waking up around 4:35 p.m. GMT on Saturday, the astronauts were approximately 169,000 miles (271,979 kilometers) from Earth and were approaching the Moon at 110,700 miles (178,154 kilometers), according to NASA.
The next major milestone of the roughly 10-day journey is expected overnight Sunday into Monday, when astronauts will enter the “lunar sphere of influence,” when the Moon’s gravity will exert a stronger pull on the spacecraft than that of Earth.
If all goes smoothly, as Orion orbits the Moon, the astronauts could set a record by venturing further from Earth than any human has yet done.
The astronauts started the day with a meal that included scrambled eggs and coffee, NASA said, and woke up to the tune of Chappell Roan’s pop hit “Pink Pony Club.”
“Morale is high on board,” Commander Reid Wiseman told Mission Control Center Houston as the space crew’s work day began.
The father of two girls was in great spirits partly because he had the opportunity to talk to his daughters from space.
“We’re up here, we’re very far away, and for a moment I was reunited with my little family,” he said in a live news conference. “It was just the best time of my entire life.”
Wiseman, along with fellow Americans Christina Koch and Victor Glover, as well as Canadian Jeremy Hansen, are embarking on a historic journey around the Moon, which they will soon be around.
It is a feat that Wiseman has described as “herculean” and that humanity has not achieved in more than half a century.
Later on Saturday, Glover was due to perform a manual piloting demonstration to provide NASA with more data on the spacecraft’s performance in deep space.
After that, the crew planned to go through their checklist to document their experience traveling around the Moon.
The astronauts received training in geology so they could photograph and describe lunar features, including ancient lava flows and impact craters.
They will see the Moon from a unique point of view compared to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Apollo flights flew about 70 miles above the lunar surface, but the Artemis 2 crew will be just over 4,000 miles away at their closest approach, allowing them to see the entire circular surface of the Moon, including the regions near both poles.
never seen before
But the Artemis 2 astronauts have already seen completely new perspectives.
“Last night we had our first view of the far side of the Moon and it was absolutely spectacular,” Koch, the mission specialist, said during a live interview from space.
John Honeycutt, director of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) program, shared a new image transmitted by the astronauts in a briefing on Saturday.
“On the far left you can see features of the Moon that had never been seen by human eyes until yesterday,” Honeycutt said, explaining that only robotic imagers had previously “seen” that region.
The Artemis 2 crew has been busy taking photos, including with smartphones, devices that NASA recently approved to carry aboard space flights.
The space agency had previously released images of Orion that included a full portrait of Earth, with its deep blue oceans and billowing clouds.
But space toileting remains a chronic problem, and astronauts have sometimes been ordered to use their backup urine bags.
An attempt to dump sewage to funnel urine into space failed, NASA said, likely due to a blockage due to ice. Troubleshooting is ongoing.
The Artemis 2 mission is part of a long-term plan to repeatedly return to the Moon, with the goal of establishing a permanent lunar base that will provide a platform for future exploration.
It’s a long-awaited journey that requires exacting precision, but there’s still room for astronauts to live out their childhood dreams of flying into space.
“It makes me feel like a little kid,” Hansen said recently, describing the joy of floating.
