(Reuters) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
HOUSTON, Texas April 6 – The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission entered the moon’s gravitational sphere of influence early Monday morning as they cruised along a path that will soon \u200btake them over the shadowed, lunar far side to become the farthest-flying humans in history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u200cArtemis II crew, flying in their Orion capsule since launching from Florida last week, are due to awake around 10:50 a.m. ET Monday for their sixth flight day. By 7:05 p.m., they will reach the mission’s maximum distance from \u200bEarth of roughly 252,757 miles, 4,102 miles beyond the record held by the Apollo 13 \u200bcrew for 56 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch \u2060and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen approach the distance record, they will be sailing around the moon’s \u200bfar side, witnessing it from roughly 4,000 miles above its darkened surface as it eclipses a basketball-sized Earth \u200bin the distant background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The milestone is a climactic point in the nearly 10-day Artemis II mission, the first crewed test flight of NASA’s Artemis program. The multibillion-dollar series of missions aims to return astronauts to the moon’s surface by \u200b2028 before China and establish a long-term U.S. presence there over the next decade, building a \u200bmoon base that would serve as a proving ground for potential future missions to Mars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Officially starting at 2:34 p.m. ET, \u200cthe \u2060lunar flyby will plunge the crew into darkness and brief communications blackouts as the moon blocks them from NASA’s Deep Space Network, a global array of massive radio communications antennas the agency has been using to talk to the crew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The flyby will last about six hours, during which the astronauts will \u200buse professional cameras to take \u200bdetailed photos through \u2060Orion’s window of the silhouetted moon, showing a rare and scientifically valuable vantage point of sunlight filtering around its edges in what will effectively be a \u200blunar eclipse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They will also have the chance to photograph a rare moment \u200bin which their \u2060home planet, dwarfed by their record-breaking distance in space, will rise from the lunar horizon as their capsule emerges from the other side, a celestial remix of a moonrise seen from Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A team of dozens \u2060of lunar \u200bscientists positioned in the Science Evaluation Room at NASA’s Johnson \u200bSpace Center in Houston will be taking notes as the astronauts, who studied an array of lunar phenomena as part of mission \u200btraining, describe their view in real time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Reuters) HOUSTON, Texas April 6 – The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission entered the moon’s gravitational sphere of influence early Monday morning as they cruised along a path that will soon \u200btake them over the shadowed, lunar far side to become the farthest-flying humans in history. The \u200cArtemis II crew, flying in their Orion capsule since launching from Florida last week, are due to awake around 10:50 a.m. ET Monday for their sixth flight day. By 7:05 p.m., they will reach the mission’s maximum distance from \u200bEarth of roughly 252,757 miles, 4,102 miles beyond the record held by… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56280,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56279"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56281,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56279\/revisions\/56281"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}