Three men and one woman are halfway through a 10-day flight around the Moon, the first crewed trip to lunar space since 1972.
Four astronauts arrived at the Moon on April 6, six days into NASA’s Artemis II mission and more than five decades after the last crew made the journey.
Their spacecraft, Orion, lifted off on Wednesday, April 1, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Reaching lunar space makes the four the first humans to do so since 1972, and it puts them farther from Earth than anyone has ever been. The previous record, 248,655 miles, was set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970. There is a certain neatness to that: in Greek mythology, Artemis is Apollo’s twin sister.
Who is on board
The crew is made up of NASA commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch, along with mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency.
What they will do up there
No landing is planned. Instead, the four will fly past the Moon while putting Orion’s life support and other onboard systems through their first crewed test, and recording what deep space does to the human body.
They will also carry out a close study of the lunar surface, including stretches of the far side that no human eye has ever seen directly, and photograph what they find. As Orion passes behind the Moon, the crew is expected to lose contact with mission control for around 40 minutes. At another point in the flight, they will watch a solar eclipse.
The trip home
After the flyby, the astronauts turn back towards Earth, bringing the mission to 10 days in total.
Artemis II follows Artemis I, the uncrewed test flight that launched in November 2022.
A live view of the spacecraft, along with a running count of the miles it has covered, is available on NASA’s AROW website.
