NASA’s Artemis II mission to fly around the far side of the Moon

The Orion capsule, carrying Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, is expected to land back to Earth after a nine-day mission that set a record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from our planet.

After making a high-speed re-entry through the atmosphere, the capsule is expected to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego at approximately 5:07PM PT / 8:07PM ET. Navy recovery crews will bring the astronauts to the USS John P. Murtha for medical checks before they helicopter back to land.

As the Artemis II astronauts prepare for the most dramatic and potentially dangerous part of their mission — reentry into Earth’s atmosphere — the eyes of the world will be on the Orion capsule and the people inside it. Getting glimpses into the capsule during the mission, the public has been able to observe the features of the astronaut’s lives, from the screens where they receive messages from Earth to the bathroom they use and how it was fixed when it broke.

Every single piece of technology in the Orion capsule has been designed not just to withstand the epic G-forces of launch and landing, but also to optimize for human interfacing. And those human factors — the personal, sometimes intangible feeling of interacting with technology that just works in a way that is intuitive and enhances daily life — are now at the forefront of spacecraft design.

The Artemis II astronauts have already captured some incredible sights of the Earth and Moon during their journey. Now we can add a new visual to that list: a total solar eclipse as seen from deep space. It looks almost too perfect; the Moon has crisp, but uneven edges, while bright stars dot the area around it.

Another photo shared by NASA shows the Earth, a portion of it cloaked in shadows, setting beyond the Moon. It’s meant to resemble the “earthrise” image captured by the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission nearly six decades ago.

A few minutes before 2PM ET on Monday, the crew of Artemis II broke a record set 56 years ago by the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission — at over 248,655 miles, they have now traveled farther from Earth than any humans before them. They marked the occasion with a crater naming ceremony that left the whole crew embracing each other in lunar orbit.

The Artemis II crew proposed names for two craters on the Moon. The first they named after their spacecraft, Integrity. The second was more personal. “A number of years ago, we started this journey and our close-knit astronaut family, and we lost a loved one,” mission specialist Jeremy Hansen said during NASA’s livestream. “Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie.”

On April 15th, 1970, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert set a distance record when Apollo 13 traveled 248,655 miles from Earth. Nearly 56 years later, the crew of Artemis II is expected to break that record by several thousand miles when the Orion spacecraft reaches a maximum distance of 252,757 miles away from Earth later today as it completes its flight around the far side of the Moon.

NASA’s coverage of the lunar flyby begins at 1PM ET today if you want to follow along at home, while the astronauts are expected to set the new distance record from Earth at 1:56PM ET. The trip around the far side of the Moon will take about six hours and include observations of the lunar surface never before seen by humans, as well as surveys to identify possible landing locations for future missions.

On Thursday, during Artemis II’s journey to the Moon, commander Reid Wiseman ran into a tech issue some of us back on Earth can relate to: Microsoft Outlook wasn’t working. In a conversation captured in NASA’s Artemis livestream and shared on Bluesky, Wiseman reported to Mission Control: “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working.”

To take care of the issue, Mission Control had to remotely access Wiseman’s personal computing device (PCD), a Microsoft Surface Pro. During a press conference on Thursday, Artemis flight director Judd Frieling said NASA had fixed the issue, stating, “This is not uncommon. We have this on-station all the time. You know, sometimes Outlook has issues getting configured, especially when you don’t have a network that’s directly connected. And so essentially we just had to reload his files on Outlook to get it working.”