Staff Reports
The four-person crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission saw parts of the moon no human has ever seen before on April 6, and described their findings in intricate detail to scientists on Earth.
The April 6 lunar flyby — where the astronauts circled the moon — marked the farthest humans have ever traveled into space, and the first time humans have visited the moon in more than 50 years. The astronauts surpassed the Apollo 13 mission’s distance record of over 248,000 miles.
Jeremy Hansen, Artemis II mission specialist and a member of the Canadian Space Agency, honored the efforts of earlier space explorers as the crew broke the record and implored future generations to carry on their mission.
“We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything we hold dear,” Hansen said. “But we most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived.”
The astronauts described the moon’s topography and meteroids hitting the far side of the moon, allowing some people to hear a human observing the moon from space for the first time ever.
They received a final list of 30 lunar surface targets for the flyby.
One of these targets was a 3.8-billion-year-old Orientale basin. The nearly 600-mile-wide crater, which resembles a bullseye, sits between the moon’s near and far sides and formed when a large object struck the lunar surface. NASA said the Artemis II crew was the first to see the entire basin, known as the “Grand Canyon” of the moon.
Up close, Mission Commander Reid Wiseman described its annular ring, one of the basin’s key aspects. “The annular ring, which I think everybody describes as a pair of lips or a kiss on the far side of the moon, from here, is very circular in nature.”
“The northern part of it is wider, darker. The southern part is much lighter,” he said. “It is very neat-looking, far more circular than I remember it looking in our training.”
During their flyby, the crew took time to suggest names for two additional craters. For one, they chose “Integrity” after the name of their spacecraft, and for the second, “Carroll” in honor of Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman.
SEEING A SOLAR ECLIPSE
The astronauts had a rare opportunity to observe a solar eclipse from the opposite vantage point, watching the sun disappear behind the moon. The roughly hour-long phenomenon allowed the crew to study the solar corona, the sun’s outermost atmosphere, as it peeked around the edge of the moon.
“It’s truly hard to describe,” Mission pilot Victor Glover said. “It’s a wicked view.”
The crew will return to Earth on April 11. The mission launched on April 1.
To see more photos from the lunar flyby, visit nasa.gov.
