Artemis crew reaches the moon, approaches record-breaking distance from Earth

The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission entered the moon’s gravitational sphere of influence early Monday morning as they cruised along a path that will soon ​take them over the shadowed, lunar far side to become the farthest-flying humans in history.

The ‌Artemis II crew, flying in their Orion capsule since launching from Florida last week, are due to awake around 10:50 a.m. ET Monday for their sixth flight day. By 7:05 p.m., they will reach the mission’s maximum distance from ​Earth of roughly 252,757 miles, 4,102 miles beyond the record held by the Apollo 13 ​crew for 56 years.

As NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch ⁠and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen approach the distance record, they will be sailing around the moon’s ​far side, witnessing it from roughly 4,000 miles above its darkened surface as it eclipses a basketball-sized Earth ​in the distant background.

The milestone is a climactic point in the nearly 10-day Artemis II mission, the first crewed test flight of NASA’s Artemis program. The multibillion-dollar series of missions aims to return astronauts to the moon’s surface by ​2028 before China and establish a long-term U.S. presence there over the next decade, building a ​moon base that would serve as a proving ground for potential future missions to Mars.

Officially starting at 2:34 p.m. ET, ‌the ⁠lunar flyby will plunge the crew into darkness and brief communications blackouts as the moon blocks them from NASA’s Deep Space Network, a global array of massive radio communications antennas the agency has been using to talk to the crew.

The flyby will last about six hours, during which the astronauts will ​use professional cameras to take ​detailed photos through ⁠Orion’s window of the silhouetted moon, showing a rare and scientifically valuable vantage point of sunlight filtering around its edges in what will effectively be a ​lunar eclipse.

They will also have the chance to photograph a rare moment ​in which their ⁠home planet, dwarfed by their record-breaking distance in space, will rise from the lunar horizon as their capsule emerges from the other side, a celestial remix of a moonrise seen from Earth.

A team of dozens ⁠of lunar ​scientists positioned in the Science Evaluation Room at NASA’s Johnson ​Space Center in Houston will be taking notes as the astronauts, who studied an array of lunar phenomena as part of mission ​training, describe their view in real time.