- Astronauts take pictures to document the trip.
- The crew sees the far side of the Moon from a new vantage point.
- Mission could bring people further than ever before.
HOUSTON: The Artemis astronauts prepared Saturday for their long-awaited lunar flyby, including reviewing the surface features they will analyze and photograph during their time orbiting the Moon.
When the astronauts awoke around 1635 GMT Saturday, the astronauts were approximately 169,000 miles (271,979 kilometers) from Earth and approaching the moon for 110,700 miles (178,154 kilometers), according to Nasa.
The next major milestone on the roughly 10-day journey is expected overnight Sunday into Monday, when the astronauts will enter the “lunar sphere of influence” — when the Moon’s gravity will have a stronger pull on the spacecraft than Earth’s.
If all goes well as Orion whips around the Moon, the astronauts could set a record by venturing farther from Earth than any human before.
The astronauts started their day with a meal that included scrambled eggs and coffee, Nasa said, and had woken up to the tune of Chappell Roan’s pop smash “Pink Pony Club”.
“Morale is high on board,” Commander Reid Wiseman told Houston’s Mission Control Center as the space crew’s workday began.
The father of two girls was in high spirits, partly because he had the opportunity to talk to his daughters from the room.
“We’re up here, we’re so far away, and for a moment I was reunited with my little family,” he told a live press conference. “It was just the greatest moment of my entire life.”
Wiseman, along with fellow Americans Christina Koch and Victor Glover and the Canadian Jeremy Hansen, is on a historic journey around the Moon, which they will soon be slinging around.
It’s a feat Wiseman has dubbed “Herculean,” and one that humanity hasn’t accomplished in more than half a century.
Later on Saturday, Glover was due to perform a manual pilot 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 have received geology training to be able to photograph and describe lunar features, including ancient lava flows and impact craters.
They will see the Moon from a unique vantage point compared to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s.
Apollo flights flew about 70 miles above the lunar surface, but the Artemis 2 crew will be just over 4,000 miles on their closest approach, which will allow them to see the Moon’s complete, circular surface, including areas near both poles.
Never seen before
But the Artemis 2 astronauts have already seen completely new perspectives.
“Last night we had our first view of the moon from the other side, and it was just absolutely spectacular,” Koch, the mission specialist, said during a live interview from space.
John Honeycutt, head of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) program, shared at a briefing on Saturday a new image transmitted by the astronauts.
“On the far left, you can see features of the Moon that have never been seen by human eyes until yesterday,” Honeycutt said, explaining that only robotic cameras had previously “seen” that region.
The Artemis 2 crew has been busy taking pictures, including with smartphones, devices that Nasa recently approved to take aboard space flights.
The space agency had previously released images from Orion that included a full portrait of Earth, with its deep blue oceans and billowing clouds.
But the space toilet has remained a chronic problem, and the astronauts have sometimes been relegated to using their extra urinal bags.
A sewage dump attempt to divert urine into space failed, Nasa said, probably due to a blockage due to ice. Troubleshooting of the issue is in progress.
The Artemis 2 mission is part of a long-term plan to repeatedly return to the Moon with the goal of establishing a permanent lunar base that will provide a platform for further exploration.
It is a highly anticipated journey that requires exacting precision – but there is still room for the astronauts to live out their childhood dreams of space flight.
“It just makes me feel like a little kid,” Hansen said recently, describing the joy of floating.
