Astronauts Set Space Travel Record

BY MICAH MAIDENBERG

The Artemis astronauts have gone the distance—the longest in human history, in fact.

Just before 2 p.m. EDT Monday, the astronauts on NASA’s Artemis II lunar mission rode their Orion craft into the record books, flying more than 248,655 miles from Earth. That surpassed the milestone NASA’s Apollo 13 mission set in 1970.

“We, most importantly, choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,” said Jeremy Hansen, the Artemis astronaut representing the Canadian Space Agency.

Monday was one of the most consequential periods for the Artemis II mission, which has proceeded with only minor glitches so far.

Earlier in the day, Orion entered a point where the gravity of the moon was exerting a stronger pull on the spacecraft than the Earth, setting up the crew—Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Hansen— for the kind of lunar flyby the National Aeronautics and Space Administration hasn’t attempted in decades.

On Monday evening, Orion transited behind the moon, where the crew lost communications with Earth for 40 min--utes or so. During that time, the ship reached its maximum distance from the planet during the mission, 252,756 miles away.

“It is so great to hear from Earth again,” Koch said to mission control at the Johnson Space Center around 7:30 p.m. ET, confirming communications were back.

Besides setting a distance record for human spaceflight, the Artemis crew has been gearing up to make the most of the time they spend swooping around the moon. That means meticulously photographing and observing the lunar surface. “We’re looking for the crew to take time during their fly-by, let their eyes adjust to what they’re seeing, and call out any of those subtle color nuances—especially on parts of the far side that never have been seen before by human eyes,” Kelsey Young, the top lunar science official for the mission, said on Saturday.

Mission controllers sent the crew a list of 30 targets to track on the lunar surface. Among them is a 3.8 billion-year-old crater called Orientale Basin.

Young said the crew trained extensively for the fly-by, including a trip to Iceland to work on describing geologic features.

The crew also proposed naming two craters on the moon as they approached it, saying they would like to call one Integrity, after the name of their ship. They suggested calling another one Carroll, after Wiseman’s late wife.

“There are islands of terrain out there that are completely surrounded by darkness, which indicates some real variation in terrain,” Glover said on NASA’s mission livestream, as the crew prepared to circle around the far side of the moon.

Glover, a Naval aviator who joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 2013, at one point observed a double crater on the lunar surface that he said resembled a snowman.

A few issues cropped up on Orion over the past couple of days, including an unusual smell in the spacecraft. It wasn’t clear what was causing the odor, NASA officials said, which may have emerged from a mechanical system or materials like tapes onboard.