Artemis II astronauts prepare to leave Earth’s orbit and head towards the moon | The moon

Four astronauts prepare to leave Earth’s orbit and head to the Moon as NASA’s Artemis II mission enters its second day.

This high-stakes, ten-day journey is expected to mark the first time in half a century that humans will return to proximity to the Moon. It is a crucial test of NASA’s ambition to return humans to the lunar surface within this decade and stay there permanently.

After about three and a half hours of rest after launch Thursday, the Artemis II crew was awakened by mission control and instructed to prepare to fire up the Orion spacecraft’s engines for a minute to adjust the orbital path even higher above Earth.

“Christina, Houston is going to get burned,” Mission Control said, chatting with Mission Specialist Christina Koch, who will become the first woman to fly around the moon.

NASA said that if “all systems remain healthy” on the Orion spacecraft, mission controllers will later give the order to perform a translunar injection, a six-minute engine start that will send the capsule on its journey to the moon.

The crew will then loop around the back of the Moon – becoming the four people to travel farthest from Earth in history – then use the celestial body’s gravity to return home.

The astronauts – three Americans and one Canadian – took off Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in front of tens of thousands of people gathered to watch the launch of NASA’s most powerful rocket, called the Space Launch System.

The scenes are reminiscent of the Apollo launches in the 1960s and 1970s, which put humans on the Moon for the first time. In Greek mythology, Artemis is a moon goddess and the twin sister of Apollo, the sun god.

A large part of the trip will be used to test systems for future Artemis missions. There have already been minor problems, including a temporary communications glitch, reports from astronauts that the cabin was a bit cold, and a flashing trouble light with the toilet on board that the crew noticed shortly after launch.

The crew also performed a proximity operations demonstration in which they manually maneuvered the capsule to evaluate its behavior when docking with another spacecraft. Future missions will include a lunar lander with which the capsule must dock.

Astronauts have also photographed Earth from very great distances. “The view from the third window, about 38,000 nautical miles away, the entire view of Earth is spectacular,” mission commander Reid Wiseman said Thursday.

Artemis II is expected to break the record for distance traveled from Earth – currently 248,655 miles (400,171 km), set in 1970 by the Apollo 13 crew, who launched a slingshot 158 ​​miles above the lunar surface during an emergency procedure to return to Earth. The Artemis mission will go much higher, to an altitude between 4,000 and 6,000 miles above the Moon, meaning that if the engines fail at any point, the capsule will still remain on a gravitational path back to Earth.

The higher altitude also gives the crew a wider field of view of the far side of the Moon, which will appear the size of a basketball held at arm’s length, and the ability to test deep space conditions on the spacecraft.

While Artemis III will conduct further docking tests in Earth’s orbit, Artemis IV, ambitiously set for launch in 2028, aims to land astronauts on the Moon’s south pole. Washington is engaged in a new space race to return to the Moon, with China poised to launch a crewed mission to the same lunar region as early as 2030.

NASA plans to build a lunar base that can accommodate a permanent human presence, and said the Artemis missions “will bring us closer to life on the Moon and Mars.”