TEXAS – During the journey around the Moon, influenced by lunar gravity, the crew – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—approached 252,755 miles from Earth, extending the record by 4,117 miles.
The astronauts are flying over the Moon’s far side, a region never directly observed by humans except during Apollo missions, and will view the lunar surface from approximately 4,000 miles above, with Earth appearing as a distant, basketball-sized sphere.
NASA mission control in Houston hosted more than 20 lunar scientists to record the astronauts’ first real-time observations of the Moon’s surface during the six-hour orbital journey. Professional cameras aboard the Orion spacecraft are capturing detailed images of sunlight illuminating the lunar edges, providing scientifically valuable data.
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Artemis II is the first crewed test flight of NASA’s Artemis program, designed to succeed the Apollo missions and pave the way for a sustainable human presence on the Moon by 2028. The program aims to establish a lunar base to serve as a platform for future missions to Mars.
This achievement marks the first human journey to the vicinity of the Moon in more than half a century, with the last manned lunar landing occurring in 1972 during Apollo 17.
