Joey Roulette
HOUSTON, Texas, April 6 (Reuters) – Four astronauts on NASA’s Artemis 2 mission entered the moon’s gravitational influence early on Monday, cruising along a path that will soon take them beyond the shadow of the moon’s far side to become the furthest humans have ever traveled in history.
The Artemis 2 crew has been flying in the Orion capsule since launching from Florida last week and is expected to wake up around 10:50 a.m. ET on Monday for its sixth flight. By 7:05 p.m., they will have reached the mission’s maximum distance of about 252,757 miles from Earth, 4,102 miles further than the 56-year-old record held by the Apollo 13 astronauts.
As NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, close in on the distance record, they will sail around the far side of the moon, some 4,000 miles above the dark surface, to witness the moon obscuring the basketball-sized Earth in the distant background.
The milestone was the culmination of the nearly 10-day Artemis 2 mission, the first crewed test flight of NASA’s Artemis program. The multibillion-dollar series of missions aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface ahead of China in 2028 and establish a long-term U.S. presence on the moon over the next decade, establishing a lunar base that can serve as a testing ground for potential future missions to Mars.
Officially starting at 2:34 p.m. ET, the moon flyby will plunge astronauts into darkness and brief communications blackouts as the moon blocks their connection to NASA’s Deep Space Network, the massive global array of radio communications antennas the agency has been using to talk to astronauts.
The flyby will last about six hours, during which astronauts will use specialized cameras to take detailed photos of the moon’s outline through Orion’s windows, showing a rare and scientifically valuable vantage point of sunlight filtering through its edges, which is actually a lunar eclipse.
They will also have the chance to photograph a rare moment when their home planet (dwarfed by the record-breaking distance into space) will rise over the lunar horizon and their capsule emerges from the other side, a celestial combination seen from Earth at moonrise.
As part of mission training, a team of dozens of lunar scientists will take notes in the Science Assessment Room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston as the astronauts study a range of lunar phenomena, describing their perspectives in real time.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Don Durfee and Aurora Ellis)
