GoKawiilAfter staring at the Moon for almost eight hours Monday, the commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission finally ran out of ways to describe what he was seeing.
“No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal,” said Reid Wiseman, the 50-year-old Navy test pilot leading the four-person crew circumnavigating the Moon. “There are no adjectives. I’m going need to invent some new ones to describe what we’re looking at outside this window.”
Live images from the Orion spacecraft showed the Moon growing larger during final approach Monday. Video from GoPro cameras outside the capsule streamed down in low-resolution format, due to limitations on bandwidth coming back from deep space, but the Artemis II astronauts were expected to downlink sharper telephoto snapshots overnight Monday into Tuesday morning.
In three years of training, Wiseman and his crewmates—Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—learned how to pilot and operate their Orion Moon ship, named Integrity. The astronauts trained for emergencies and prepared themselves to accept the risk of flying the first crew mission on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule. Artemis II is the first human mission to the vicinity of the Moon in more than 53 years, so NASA put the astronauts through geology and photography courses to document their observations of the lunar surface.
The preparation is paying off. The Orion spacecraft has performed well since its launch last week, and the crew looped behind the Moon on Monday, reaching their closest point to the lunar surface at a distance of 4,067 miles (6,545 kilometers) at 7 pm EDT (23:00 UTC). Two minutes later, Artemis II arrived at the mission’s most distant point from Earth at a range of 252,756 miles (406,771 kilometers), setting a new record for the farthest anyone has traveled into space.
Those milestones occurred as the spacecraft flew behind the Moon, as seen from Earth, with no way for mission controllers in Houston to contact the astronauts inside Integrity. After about 40 minutes without radio contact, Artemis II reemerged from behind the Moon and restored communications with engineers in Houston.