- Astronauts take photos to document their journey.
- The crew sees the dark side of the Moon from a new perspective.
- The mission could take humans further than ever before.
HOUSTON: Artemis astronauts were preparing Saturday for their long-awaited lunar flyby, including examining the surface features they must analyze and photograph during their tour around the Moon.
When they woke up Saturday around 4:35 p.m. GMT, the astronauts were about 169,000 miles (271,979 kilometers) from Earth and approaching the Moon at 110,700 miles (178,154 kilometers), according to NASA.
The next major step in the roughly 10-day journey is expected Sunday night, when the astronauts will enter the “lunar sphere of influence” — when the Moon’s gravity will exert a stronger pull on the spacecraft than Earth’s.
If all goes well, as Orion orbits the Moon, astronauts could set a record by venturing further from Earth than any human has before.
The astronauts started their day with a meal including scrambled eggs and coffee, NASA said, and woke up to the sound of Chappell Roan’s pop hit, “Pink Pony Club.”
“Morale is good on board,” Commander Reid Wiseman said at Mission Control Center in Houston as the space crew’s workday began.
The father of two daughters was in good spirits, partly because he had the chance to speak with his daughters from space.
“We are here, we are so far away, and for a moment, I found my little family,” he said during a live press conference. “It was simply the greatest moment of my entire life.”
Wiseman and his fellow Americans Christina Koch and Victor Glover as well as Canadian Jeremy Hansen are making a historic trip around the Moon, which they soon have to circle with a slingshot.
It’s a feat that Wiseman called “Herculean” and one that humanity has not accomplished in more than half a century.
Later Saturday, Glover was scheduled 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 review 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 perspective 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 its closest approach, allowing them to see the full circular surface of the Moon, including regions near both poles.
Never seen before
But the Artemis 2 astronauts have already discovered completely new perspectives.
“Last night we got our first view of the far side of the Moon, and it was absolutely spectacular,” Koch, the mission specialist, said in a live interview from space.
John Honeycutt, head of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) program, shared during a briefing on Saturday a new image transmitted by the astronauts.
“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” this region.
The Artemis 2 crew has been busy taking photos, particularly with smartphones, devices that NASA recently approved for use on spaceflight.
The space agency previously released images of Orion that included a comprehensive portrait of Earth, showcasing its deep blue oceans and puffy clouds.
But space toilets remain a chronic problem, and astronauts have sometimes been asked to use their emergency urinals.
An attempt to dump sewage to channel urine into space failed, NASA said, likely due to ice blockage. Troubleshooting of the issue is in progress.
The Artemis 2 mission is part of a longer-term plan to return to the Moon multiple times, with the goal of establishing a permanent lunar base that will provide a platform for further exploration.
It’s a highly anticipated journey that requires pinpoint precision, but astronauts still have the opportunity to live out their childhood dreams of spaceflight.
“It makes me feel like a little kid,” Hansen said recently, describing the joy of floating.
