Artemis II crew describe ‘overwhelming’ emotions after soaring past the moon

NASA’s Artemis II astronauts have described the powerful emotion felt when soaring over the moon as they photographed impact craters, cracks and ridges and began their long journey home.Among the eagerly awaited images captured by the crew, who worked in pairs at the Orion capsule windows, are those of the Earth rising from behind the moon, a solar eclipse and parts of the 590-mile (950km) wide Orientale impact basin that have never been observed with the naked eye.Further images are expected to shed light on the brown, green and orange-hues the astronauts reported on the greyish landscape, and possibly faint layers of moondust that may have been visible during the Earthrise.Key moments from the Artemis II lunar flyby – videoHaving swung around the far side of the moon on Monday, a manoeuvre that cut the crew’s contact with mission control for 40 minutes, the four astronauts are now hurtling back to Earth. The quarter of a million mile return trip is due to end in a splashdown near the coast of San Diego at 8.07pm on Friday US eastern time.The NASA astronaut Christina Koch, who is the first woman to fly around the moon, said of observing the lunar surface at such close quarters. “I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon. It lasted just a second or two and I actually couldn’t even make it happen again, but something just threw me in suddenly to the lunar landscape and it became real.”She said she was particularly struck by the bright new craters that shone from the surface like pinpricks in a lampshade. “They are so bright compared to the rest of the moon.”An image of the moon’s surface captured by the Artemis II astronauts. Photograph: NASA/AFP/Getty ImagesFellow astronaut Victor Glover, the first black man to travel beyond low Earth orbit, said: “It was very moving to look out the window.”“I went straight where Christina went, and I was walking around down there on the surface, climbing and off-roading on that amazing terrain,” Glover told NASA’s capsule command, or CapCom. On Tuesday, the crew will discuss their observations of the moon’s far side with the mission’s science team.The Orion spacecraft began its journey to the moon on 1 April when it blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on NASA’s Space Launch System, the agency’s rocket for deep space missions. Onboard are the NASA astronauts Koch, Glover and Reid Wiseman, and the Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.On Monday, the crew broke the record for the farthest humans have travelled from Earth, reaching a distance of 252,756 miles, surpassing the previous record of 248,655 miles set by Apollo 13 in 1970. On their closest approach to the moon, the Artemis II crew came within 4,070 miles of the lunar surface.To mark the return leg of the lunar flyby, NASA’s flight controllers in Houston flipped over the mission patches on their consoles, swapping an image of the moon in front of the Earth for the outbound trip for one with the moon behind the Earth.The Artemis II crew captured the moon eclipsing the sun. Photograph: APThe capsule will return to Earth after jettisoning the service module that provided power and propulsion for the trip to the moon. One of the most risky stages is re-entry when the capsule slams into the atmosphere at more than 20,000mph, causing its heat shield to reach temperatures above 1,600C (2,900F).When the Artemis I mission returned to Earth in 2022, NASA found that pieces of the capsule’s heat shield had been damaged on re-entry. To reduce the risk with Artemis II, the capsule will come in at a steeper angle, minimising the time the heat shield spends at the temperature where the trouble arises.Once through the atmosphere, the spacecraft will release parachutes to slow its descent before its splashdown in the North Pacific Ocean.