Artemis II broke the record: Filmed the hidden side of the Moon, the farthest astronauts from Earth

Four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis ⁠2 mission flew deeper into space than any humans before them on Monday, as they passed behind the far side of the moon in their Orion capsule, the agencies report. During a six-hour flight around the otherwise hidden hemisphere of Earth’s only natural satellite, the astronauts observed sporadic “impact flashes” of meteors that littered the darkened and heavily cratered ​ Moon’s surface, reports Reuters. Twenty scientists filled the ​ conference room next to Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to watch the lunar phenomena witnessed by the Artemis crew in real time as their SUV-sized Orion spacecraft orbited the moon at a distance of approximately 250,000 miles from Earth.

The six-hour flyby, which passed within 6,470 kilometers of the moon’s surface, came six days after the start of a spaceflight that marks the first trip by an astronaut near the moon since NASA’s Cold War-era Apollo missions more than half a century ago.

As part of those six missions, two-person teams landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972 – the only 12 people to ever walk on its surface.

Artemis, the successor to the Apollo program, aims to repeat that achievement by 2028, before China’s first landing, and establish a long-term US presence on the Moon over the next decade, including a lunar base that will serve as a training ground for potential future missions to Mars.

Although intended as a crewed dress rehearsal for future lunar excursions, Artemis 2 generated a wealth of new material for lunar scientists to study, including meteor impact flashes captured during Monday’s flyby that resembled the sparks and streaks of light described by some of the Apollo astronauts.

The Artemis 2 crew, which has been flying in its Orion capsule since launching from Florida last week, began its sixth day of space travel by waking up Monday to a pre-recorded message from the late NASA astronaut Jim Lovell, who flew on the Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 missions to the moon.

“Welcome to my old neighborhood,” said Lovell, who died last year at age 97. “This is a historic day and I know how busy you will be, but don’t forget to enjoy ​​ the view…may you be lucky,” said Reuters.

Hours later, the crew of American astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, made spaceflight history by traveling farther from Earth than humans had ever done before, a distance of 406,771 kilometers.

The previous record, approximately 399 thousand km, was set in 1970 by Apollo 13 after a near-catastrophic failure of the spacecraft that ended that mission, forcing Lovell and two members of his crew to use the Moon’s gravity to return safely to Earth.
On the way to the other side of the Moon, the Artemis astronauts spent some time assigning temporary new names to the Moon’s features that previously had no official designations.

In a radio message to mission control in Houston, Hansen suggested naming one crater Integrity, after the crew gave the Orion capsule, and naming the other after Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.

“A few years ago we started this journey, our close family of astronauts, and we lost a loved one,” Hansen said of the mission commander’s late wife, his voice filled with emotion as he described the location of her lunar namesake. “It’s a bright spot on the moon and we’d like to call it Carroll.”

Hansen later said that the crew saw a number of lunar features that “no man had ever seen before, not even in Apollo.”

As Orion raced around the far side of the Moon, the astronauts photographed a rare moment in which Earth, dwarfed by the planet’s record distance, set and rose with the Moon’s horizon as they circled the Moon, a stunning celestial reversal of the rising and setting Moon as seen normally from Earth.

Since the Moon rotates at the same rate as the Earth, its far side always faces away from our planet, and only the Artemis and Apollo astronauts have ever looked directly at its surface.