Four astronauts travelling back to Earth from the far side of the moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission spoke of their emotions as they wrapped up \u200bthe unprecedented flight and prepared to re-enter the atmosphere in a “fireball” during their first press conference from space on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The Artemis II crew, flying in their Orion \u200ccapsule since launching from Florida last week, are due to splash down off the Southern California coast on Friday evening after reaching the moon earlier this week. They cruised along a path that took them past the shadowed, lunar far side to become the farthest-flying humans in history.<\/p>\n
On the trip back home, they will reach speeds of up to 23,839 mph (38,365 kph) as they enter Earth’s atmosphere, a high-risk phase of the mission that will put Orion’s heatshield to the test \u200bas it gets battered by intense atmospheric friction.<\/p>\n
“I’ve actually been thinking about entry since April 3, 2023 when we got assigned to this mission,” said Artemis II mission pilot Victor \u200bGlover, when asked how he was feeling about the return.<\/p>\n
“There’s so many more pictures, so many more stories, and gosh, I haven’t even begun to \u2060process what we’ve been through. We’ve still got two more days, and riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well.”<\/p>\n
Glover and fellow NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch, and \u200bCanadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen are the first wave of astronauts in a multibillion-dollar series of missions under the Artemis program that aims to return humans to the moon’s surface by 2028 before China, and \u200bestablish a long-term US presence over the next decade, building a moon base for potential future missions to Mars.<\/p>\n
Read:\u00a0Artemis II crew snaps historic Earthset photo on way home<\/p>\n
Koch cast the mission series as a relay race, telling reporters: “In fact, we have batons that we bought to symbolise, physically, that.”<\/p>\n
“We plan to hand them to the next crew, and every single thing that we do is with them in mind,” she said.<\/p>\n
That next mission, Artemis III, will involve a docking test in low-Earth orbit between the Orion capsule \u200band both astronaut lunar landers that NASA plans to use to put its astronauts on the moon in later missions.<\/p>\n
Artemis IV, targeted for 2028, would be the program’s first crewed lunar landing, \u200band the first since Apollo 17 in 1972.<\/p>\n
Back on Earth, dozens of lunar scientists have been packed in rooms adjacent to NASA’s Mission Control Centre in Houston this week, scribbling down notes and debating a steady stream \u200cof both \u2060real-time and recorded audio from the Artemis II astronaut crew in their Orion spacecraft.<\/p>\n
Splashdown<\/p>\n
The crew is due to return to Earth on Friday around 8pm ET (0000 GMT Saturday), splashing down off the coast of San Diego, California, to cap their nearly 10-day mission.<\/p>\n
The four astronauts on Monday had reached a record-breaking distance from Earth of roughly 252,000 miles, surpassing by some 4,000 miles the previous record held by the Apollo 13 crew for 56 years.
\nWiseman, Artemis II mission commander, told reporters the crew each had two “very brief” chats with their families during the mission.<\/p>\n
“Hearing your crew mates giggling and crying, and \u200bjust gasping and listening and loving their families \u200bfrom afar – family is so important to \u2060all four of us, and that has been amazing,” he said.<\/p>\n
Read More:\u00a0Artemis II moon crew flies farther than humans have ever gone before<\/p>\n
In a radio message to mission control in Houston on Monday, as the crew approached their closest distance to the lunar surface, Hansen suggested naming a fresh crater on the moon in honour of Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died \u200bof cancer in 2020.<\/p>\n
Wiseman told reporters his crewmates approached him with the idea to name the crater Carroll while they were in quarantine before \u200blaunching to space.<\/p>\n
“That was an \u2060emotional moment for me,” Wiseman said. “I said ‘Absolutely, I would love that’ … but I can’t give the speech. I can’t give the talk.”<\/p>\n
In the mission’s sixth day, Hansen choked up as he made the suggestion to mission control which was a tear-jerking moment for many NASA staff in Houston.<\/p>\n
The astronauts broke their distance record during the lunar flyby in which they surveyed the moon’s surface from roughly 4,000 miles above.<\/p>\n
Advances in lunar science have typically \u2060relied on \u200blunar-orbiting satellites and Earth-based observations. But the crew’s six-hour lunar flyby provided a real-time stream of scientific collections from human \u200beyes, allowing rare back-and-forth discussions between teams on the ground and their fellow scientists over 252,000 miles away in deep space.<\/p>\n
Scientists see NASA’s Artemis II mission as an important early step in unlocking mysteries about the solar system’s formation. The moon, \u200bArtemis II mission specialist Koch said before launching to space last week, is a “witness plate” to the formation of our solar system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Four astronauts travelling back to Earth from the far side of the moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission spoke of their emotions as they wrapped up \u200bthe unprecedented flight and prepared to re-enter the atmosphere in a “fireball” during their first press conference from space on Wednesday. The Artemis II crew, flying in their Orion …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3735"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3742,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3735\/revisions\/3742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistantimesusa.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}