NASA’s Artemis II astronauts celebrate epic lunar flyby with stunning new images

On the sixth day, NASA Artemis II The mission has finally kept its promises.

Its four astronauts – NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen – successfully traveled around the Moon, bringing humans close to the Moon for the first time in more than half a century. In doing so, they became the furthest people from Earth, experienced a solar eclipse in space, captured images of our planet’s “Earthset” and “Earthrise” and saw features of the far side of the Moon that no one had seen before.

After the observations were completed, they heard from President Donald Trump: NASA’s Artemis program began during his first term.

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“You know, I had a decision to make in my first term, and the decision is ‘What are we going to do at NASA?'” the president told the crew after congratulating them on a call Monday. “Are [we] are we going to restart it or are we going to close it? We spent what we had to.

The call comes just days after the release of the White House’s latest 2027 federal budget proposal, which calls for cutting NASA funding by 23 percent and cutting the space agency’s science budget by 47 percent. Adjusted for inflation, if passed, Trump’s proposal would give NASA its smallest budget since 1961.

The conversation broke down after the president favorably compared crew member Hansen to famous Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky. The astronauts laughed and cheered before becoming visibly unsure, as no response came from the ground for a full minute. Wiseman asked for “a quick communications check,” to which Trump immediately responded that he was still on the line, ending the call shortly after.

Yet speaking to the U.S. president was, in some ways, one of the most unremarkable things the crew did that day.

The excitement began around 2 p.m. EDT, when they officially became the furthest humans from Earth in history, surpassing a record set in 1970 by astronauts from Apollo 13.

“Above all, we’re choosing this moment to challenge this generation and the next, to make sure this record doesn’t last long,” Hansen said as the milestone was reached.

They had spent years preparing for this moment, a fleeting window of time to gaze upon and document the moon. Rising some 4,067 miles above the surface at closest approach, the astronauts saw the Moon like no one had before.

THE Artemis II The team took turns for several hours photographing and reporting what they saw at Houston Ground Control and to the public watching their live-streamed progress. The limitations of deep space communications meant that their snapshots were not immediately available, leaving the crew searching for words to describe what they were seeing: a ridge like a “healing wound” on lunar skin, craters glowing like “a lampshade with tiny pinholes,” streaks of frozen lava as smooth as a “paved road.”

“It was hard to talk while looking through the Zoom,” Glover said at one point. “I was walking around there, on the surface, climbing and off-roading on this incredible terrain.”

Fortunately, the crew had been trained to lock in and make sense of the dazzling spectacle of color and light playing through Orion’s windows.

The brightness or darkness of a given element – ​​its color on the white-black spectrum, or its “albedo” – is a mixture of its topography, illumination and reflectivity. So a point may appear dark because it is indented or because of a shadow cast by a nearby ridge or because it has a mineral composition that sparkles differently than simple moon dust. Armed with flash cards and extensive training, the astronauts identified known features and brainstormed new discoveries as best they could.

At 6:44 p.m., the Orion spacecraft slipped behind the moon, triggering a planned 40-minute communications outage with mission control. “We will always feel your love from Earth,” Glover said just before contact was lost. “We’ll see you on the other side.” The crew reappeared in line-of-sight communications with Earth at 7:24 p.m. and saw our world as a small teal crescent against the darkness of deep space. It was the first “Earthrise” observed by astronauts since the last Apollo mission in 1972, and it showed parts of Africa, Asia and Oceania. Artemis II crew.

An hour later (after further observations), the astronauts witnessed another stunning spectacle as the sun passed behind the moon from their perspective. The total solar eclipse lasted about an hour. During the eclipse, the crew counted several flashes from micrometeoroid impacts on the lunar surface and were amazed to see the face of the moon lit with a faint bluish glow: this was Earth’s light, the reflected light of our world’s oceans, clouds and continents.

“No matter how long we look at this, our brain doesn’t process this image in front of us,” Wiseman said. “It’s absolutely spectacular, surreal. There are no adjectives.”

At 9:24 p.m., fiery tendrils from the sun’s flickering corona, described as “baby hairs,” began growing from the edge of the moon, signaling the sun’s imminent return and the final moments of the eclipse. “That baby hair grows out quickly around nine o’clock,” Glover said. “If you’ve ever seen the spotlights from the top of the Luxor at night in Las Vegas, it looks like what it wants to be when it grows up.”

After their call with Trump, the crew began their pre-sleep routine, preparing for the long journey home. Orion’s flyby of the Moon had recurved the spacecraft’s trajectory toward Earth, where, if all goes well, the crew is expected to land in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California, shortly after 8 p.m. on April 10. At 1:25 p.m. on April 7, the seventh day of the space mission, Orion will leave the Moon’s sphere of influence, falling back into Earth’s gravitational dominance.

The crew is also expected to speak with scientists on Tuesday about their lunar observations. And later today, they will answer another long-distance call from astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Otherwise, the crew will spend most of their seventh day in space, off duty, resting for their final return home and no doubt remembering their fleeting encounter with the moon.