Artemis Mission Crew Captured by Moon's Gravity

The four astronauts on NASA's Artemis II mission entered the Moon's gravitational sphere of influence early Monday, moving on a trajectory that will soon take them beyond the Moon's shadowy far side to become the furthest away flying people in history.

The Artemis II mission crew, stranded in the Orion capsule since liftoff from Florida last week, is scheduled to wake up around 10:50 a.m. ET Monday to begin its sixth flight day, writes xrust. By 7:05 p.m., they will reach the mission's maximum distance from Earth of approximately 252,757 miles, 4,102 miles beyond the record held by the Apollo 13 crew for 56 years.

As NASA astronauts Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen close in on the distance record, they will fly around the far side of the Moon, observing it from about 4,000 miles above the darkened Moon. surface. After all, it will dwarf the basketball-sized Earth in the distant background.

The event is the culmination of the nearly 10-day Artemis II mission, the first crewed test flight of NASA's Artemis program. The goal of this multibillion-dollar series of missions is to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028 ahead of China and establish a long-term U.S. presence there over the next decade by building a lunar base that will serve as a testing ground for potential future missions to Mars.

Officially beginning at 2:34 pm ET, the flyby of the Moon will plunge the crew into darkness and cause brief communications outages as the Moon blocks their access to NASA's Deep Space Communications Network, a global network of massive radio antennas the agency uses to communicate with crew.

The flyby will last about six hours, during which astronauts will use professional cameras to take detailed photographs of the Moon's silhouette through Orion's window, demonstrating a rare and scientifically valuable vantage point where sunlight filters through its edges, effectively creating the effect of a lunar eclipse.

They will also have the opportunity to capture the rare moment when their home planet, dwarfed by the record distance in space, rises above the lunar horizon as their capsule emerges from the other side — a celestial reimagining of the moonrise seen from Earth.

A group of dozens of lunar scientists located in the Research Hall of the Space Center. Johnson, NASA, in Houston, will take notes as astronauts, who studied a variety of lunar phenomena in preparation for the mission, describe what they saw in real time.

Based on materials from https://www.reuters

Xrust The crew of the Artemis mission is captured by the gravity of the Moon