The Artemis astronauts were gearing up Saturday for their long-anticipated lunar flyby, including reviewing the surface features they must analyse and photograph during their time circling the Moon.
Upon waking around 1635 GMT on Saturday, the astronauts were approximately 271,979 kilometres from Earth, and approaching the Moon at 178,154 kilometres, according to NASA.
The next major milestone of the approximately 10-day journey is expected overnight Sunday into Monday, at which point 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 proceeds smoothly, as Orion whips around the Moon the astronauts could set a record by venturing farther from Earth than any human before.
The astronauts kicked off 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 centre as the space crew’s work day began.
The father of two girls was in high spirits in part because he had the chance to speak with his daughters from space.
“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 as well as Canadian Jeremy Hansen are on a historic journey around the Moon, which they’re soon due to slingshot around.
It’s a feat Wiseman has dubbed “Herculean” and which humanity has not accomplished in more than half a century.
Later on Saturday, Glover was due to perform a manual piloting demonstration to provide NASA with more data regarding the spacecraft’s performance in deep space.
After that, the crew was planning to go over their checklist for documenting their experience travelling around the Moon.
The astronauts have had geology training in order to be able to photograph and describe lunar features, including ancient lava flows and impact craters.
They’ll see the Moon from a unique vantage point compared with the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s.
Apollo flights flew some 70 miles above the lunar surface, but the Artemis 2 crew will be just over 4,000 miles at their closest approach, which will allow them to see the complete, circular surface of the Moon, including regions near both poles.
Never before seen
But the Artemis 2 astronauts have already seen brand-new perspectives.
“Last night, we did have our first view of the moon’s far side, and it was just absolutely spectacular,” Koch, the mission specialist, said during a live interview from space.
John Honeycutt, manager 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 imagers had previously “seen” that region.
The Artemis 2 crew has been busy taking photographs, including with smartphones, devices NASA recently approved to take aboard spaceflights.
The space agency had previously released images from Orion that included a full portrait of Earth, featuring its deep blue oceans and billowing clouds.
But the space toilet has remained a chronic problem, and the astronauts have on occasion been directed to use their back-up urinal bags.
An attempted wastewater dump to funnel urine into space failed, NASA said, likely due to a blockage because of ice. Troubleshooting of the problem is ongoing.
The Artemis 2 mission is part of a longer-term plan to repeatedly return to the Moon, with the goal of establishing a permanent lunar base that will offer a platform for further exploration.
It’s a highly anticipated journey that demands exacting precision — but there’s still room for the astronauts to live out their childhood dreams of spaceflight.
“It just makes me feel like a little kid,” said Hansen recently, describing the joy of floating.