Artemis II Update

Five days after starting their journey in deep space, the Artemis II crew arrived at the Moon on April 6 and immediately entered a period of observation for about seven hours as Orion circled the lunar surface. The entire mission was so far incredibly smooth, the translunar injection burn having gone flawlessly a few days earlier and placing the spacecraft on a trajectory that would loop around the Moon and use its gravity to return to Earth. As the crew approached, astronaut Christina Koch described the sensation quite nicely: "We are now falling to the Moon rather than rising away from Earth." In the meantime, the four of them had spent their days working out with Orion's small flywheel, practicing the spacecraft's manual controls in deep space, and going over the list of lunar landmarks the science team had asked them to photograph.

Orion reached its nearest point by traveling only 4,067 miles above the lunar surface while its speed relative to Earth was almost 61,000 miles per hour. The crew took pictures of impact craters, ancient lava flows, and surface ridges on both the near and far sides of the Moon. Some of their targets included the Orientale basin, a crater almost 600 miles wide formed 3.8 billion years ago, and the Hertzsprung basin on the far side, a place no human has ever seen directly with their own eyes. They described variations in color, brightness, and texture across the surface that will enable scientists to better decipher the Moon's composition and its history.

The spacecraft was behind the Moon causing the loss of communication for about 40 minutes, which is one of the longest blackouts in the history of human spaceflight. During that time, the astronauts saw an Earth-set: the Earth going down below the lunar horizon and an Earthrise as Orion was coming out from the other side. Then, the Moon, spacecraft, and Sun lined up so well that the crew enjoyed a solar eclipse from space with the duration of almost one hour. When the Sun was completely covered by the dark Moon, they studied the solar corona shining around its edge and noticed six flashes on the surface caused by meteoroids hitting the Moon at thousands of miles per hour, the data which the scientists are currently studying.

In fact, at their furthest point, they were 252,756 miles away from Earth, exceeding the Apollo 13 record from 1970 by over 4,000 miles. After coming around the far side, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen described the experience: "You really felt like you weren't in a capsule. You'd been transported to the far side of the Moon. It really just bent your mind." As of now the crew is heading home and the splashdown is planned to happen near the coast of San Diego on April 10th. A mission that was originally a test flight has become one of the most incredible chapters in the history of human exploration and, in fact, the mission is still ongoing.

(Image Credit: NASA)