The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission entered the moon’s gravitational sphere of influence early Monday morning, cruising along a trajectory that will soon carry them over the lunar far side.
They are on track to become the farthest-flying humans in history.Flying in their Orion capsule since last week’s launch from Florida, the Artemis II crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — are scheduled to awaken around 10:50 a.m. ET for their sixth flight day.
By 7:05 p.m., they are expected to reach the mission’s maximum distance from Earth: roughly 252,757 miles, surpassing the Apollo 13 record by 4,102 miles, a mark that has stood for 56 years.As they approach this milestone, the astronauts will orbit around the moon’s far side, observing it from about 4,000 miles above its shadowed surface.
From this vantage, they will see a small, basketball-sized Earth hanging in the distance, a view few humans have ever witnessed.The lunar flyby, officially starting at 2:34 p.m. ET, will plunge the crew into temporary darkness and brief communications blackouts.
The moon will block signals to NASA’s Deep Space Network, the global array of massive antennas used to communicate with the spacecraft.During the roughly six-hour flyby, the astronauts will capture detailed photographs of the silhouetted moon using professional cameras aboard Orion.
The images will show sunlight filtering around the moon’s edges, creating an effect akin to a lunar eclipse and providing valuable scientific observations.In a rare celestial moment, the crew will also have the opportunity to photograph Earth rising from the lunar horizon as their capsule emerges from the far side, creating a striking contrast between their distant home planet and their record-breaking position in space.
A team of lunar scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will monitor the mission in real time. Positioned in the Science Evaluation Room, they will take notes as the astronauts describe the lunar phenomena they observe — insights they studied extensively during mission training.
The nearly 10-day Artemis II mission is the first crewed test flight of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the moon by 2028 and establish a long-term U.S. presence. The program envisions a future moon base serving as a proving ground for potential crewed missions to Mars.