GoKawiilView of the Moon from the Orion capsule as the crew set the record for the farthest distance humans have travelled from Earth.Credit: NASA
Updated 6 April 2026, 4.03 p.m. CDT (Houston time)
The astronauts have been switching spots at the capsule windows. Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen were the first to do observations and take photos. Then it was Christina Koch and Victor Glover’s turn. Now, they’re about to switch back.
The astronauts have three cameras on board: two Nikon D5 DSLRs, which are the workhorses of spaceflight photography, and one Nikon Z9, a newer mirrorless camera that was added at nearly the last moment. These automatically take three exposures for every press of the button. The first is an exposure that the Artemis II team members think is correct for the lighting conditions in that moment, the second is one that they think will be underexposed and the third is one that they think will be overexposed — to be sure one of the images will turn out well.
They are using a 400-millimetre lens to get as much detail as possible of the lunar disk. The astronauts observe the Moon in pairs, one photographing the surface while the other observes with the naked eye. They have trained to recognize basic geological features of the Moon, including the massive Orientale impact basin that is a major focus of today’s studies because it has never been observed fully by the human eye before. — Alexandra Witze
Updated 6 April 2026, 3.18 p.m. CDT (Houston time)
Reader question: Do the astronauts have science in their backgrounds?
Some of them do, yes. Mission specialist Christina Koch is an engineer who worked at scientific field stations in Greenland and Antarctica. Mission specialist Jeremy Hansen has a master’s degree in physics and worked at the underwater Aquarius laboratory off the coast of Florida, which is meant to emulate deep-space flight. (Incidentally, although this is Hansen’s first flight to space, Koch holds a number of spaceflight records.)
Reid Wiseman, the commander, set a record for science in orbit when he and a colleague performed 82 hours of research on the International Space Station during a single week in 2014.
The fourth astronaut, pilot Victor Glover, is a Navy aviator and test pilot. — Alexandra Witze
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