NASA shared a series of pictures taken by the Artemis II crew members as they moved past the halfway point to their destination.
John Honeycutt, the manager of NASA’s Space Launch System Program, told reporters Saturday that NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are now closer to the moon than they are to earth.
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“It looks like they’re really enjoying their work,” Honeycutt said. “I can tell that in their voice, when we’re listening to the voice loops, and then all the imagery that we’ve been getting is pretty incredible.”
Those pictures includes one of the moon that includes features never before seen by human eyes, only robotic imagers — until now.
During their 10-day mission, the crew will travel a total of 695,081 miles from launch to splashdown. The rocket, which is carrying the Orion shuttle, successfully lifted off from its launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida, at 6:35 pm ET on Wednesday.
Should everything go as planned, the four astronauts will have traveled farther from Earth than anyone else in human history.
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On the fourth day of the trip, astronauts prepared for Monday’s lunar flyby, during which the Orion’s main cabin windows will be pointed toward the moon, and the Artemis II crew can make scientific observations. Glover, on Saturday night, is set to take manual control of the spacecraft to test its performance in deep space, NASA said.
The astronauts will then go over a list of surface features they’re being asked to analyze and photograph as they fly by the moon.