NASA’s Orion Integrity spacecraft has completed a record-breaking journey around the Moon as part of the Artemis II mission. It didn’t enter lunar orbit, but “merely” circled it to boldly go where no one has gone before, approximately 406,771 kilometers (252,756 miles) from Earth, breaking the record for the maximum distance for a human spaceflight that was held by Apollo 13. That 1970 mission reminds us of the risks astronauts face in space, and after completing that feat, astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Jeremy Hansen set course for their return to Earth, scheduled for Friday, April 10.
The launch of the Artemis II mission, when it was April 1 in the USA, was such a success that a couple of corrective maneuvers scheduled to refine the route to the Moon were canceled because they were no longer necessary. On April 6, the Orion Integrity spacecraft began its journey around the Moon, during which the astronauts captured a lot of footage of the far side, also discovering some new craters.
During approximately seven hours of observations at an altitude of about 6,550 kilometers (about 4,070 miles) above the Moon’s surface, the Orion Integrity spacecraft crew also witnessed a total solar eclipse, as the Sun was completely obscured by the Moon from the astronauts’ perspective. They proposed two names for the craters they identified: Integrity, clearly after their spacecraft, and Carroll, after Reid Wiseman’s wife, who sadly passed away in 2020. The choice of astronomical names is up to the IAU (International Astronomical Union), so the final names could be completely different.
The toilet aboard the Orion Integrity spacecraft is giving astronauts some trouble, which isn’t exactly the most “romantic” aspect of the mission. Nonetheless, reaching more than 6,000 kilometers farther from Earth than Apollo 13 did in 1970 in the first mission to carry astronauts into deep space in decades is a remarkable achievement. It’s certainly not interstellar travel, but it has already made history to boldly go where no one has gone before.
