Artemis astronauts break record for distance from earth
The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission reached the farthest any human has ever been from Earth, moving along a path within the moon’s gravitational domain that will soon take them to the moon’s shadowy far side.
The Artemis II crew, who have been flying Orion capsules since launching from Florida last week, awoke on the sixth flight day to a recorded message from Jim Lovell, the late Apollo 8 and 13 astronaut.
“Welcome to my old neighborhood,” said Lovell, who died last year at the age of 97.
“This is a historic day and I know how busy you will be, but don’t forget to enjoy the view… good luck and good luck.”
Later Tuesday, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, would reach the maximum distance from Earth of approximately 406,780 km, 6,606 km beyond the record held by Lovell and the Apollo 13 crew for 56 years.
As they approached the distance record, they were sailing around the far side of the moon above its dark surface, eclipsing a basketball-sized world in the distant background.
This milestone is the culmination of the approximately 10-day Artemis II mission, the first crewed test flight of NASA’s Artemis program.
A series of multibillion-dollar missions aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface before China by 2028, establishing a long-term U.S. presence there over the next decade and building a lunar base that will serve as a testing ground for potential future missions to Mars.
The lunar flight will plunge the crew into darkness and there will be brief communications blackouts as the moon blocks them from NASA’s Deep Space Network, a global array of massive radio communications antennas that the agency uses to talk to the crew.
The flight will last about six hours, during which time astronauts will use professional cameras to take detailed photographs of the moon from Orion’s window, showing a rare and scientifically valuable vantage point of sunlight filtering around its edges.
The crew will also have the chance to photograph a rare moment when their home planet, dwarfed by their record distance in space, will set and rise with the lunar horizon as it rotates, a celestial remix of a moonrise as seen from Earth.
Positioned in the Science Evaluation Room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, a team of dozens of lunar scientists will take notes as astronauts studying a series of lunar events as part of mission training recount their views in real time.
