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The Artemis II crew is packing up to prepare for landing after a successful loop around the moon.
The capsule is pointed back toward Earth, with a splashdown planned for Friday around 8:06 p.m. ET in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, Calif., NASA officials say.
“All of the science equipment and cameras and tablets and reference material that got unstowed in support of the flyby, we have to put that all away,” NASA flight director Rick Henfling said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon.
“We have to pack up our our suitcases and get ready to come home.”
The historic mission broke the distance record Monday as the farthest humans have flown from Earth, reaching 406,771 kilometres and beating the previous record of 400,171 kilometres set by Apollo 13 in 1970.
The astronauts also got to name two lunar craters. They proposed Integrity, their capsule’s name, and Carroll, in honour of Wiseman’s late wife who died of cancer in 2020.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in mission control” when the names were announced, Henfling said.
Crew members spent seven hours making observations during the lunar flyby and reported seeing details on the moon’s surface as well as Mars, Venus and Saturn in the distance.
NASA geologist Kelsey Young said Tuesday there were “audible screams of delight” in the science room when the astronauts mentioned seeing impact flashes, which are caused by “micro-meteorites” hitting the moon’s surface.
“Listening to the level of scientific discourse that the crew was having yesterday was incredibly inspiring,” she said.
Officials said the crew members captured more than 175 GB worth of images from the flyby, and that all images and data gathered will be made publicly available within six months.
Integrity travelled though a lunar eclipse for about an hour, coming as close as about 6,545 kilometres to the moon’s surface.
After the flyby, the crew received a call from U.S. President Donald Trump, who told them they would be invited to the White House upon their return.
Call to the International Space Station
Following the day of intensive scientific observations, the crew had an uplifting video call with the International Space Station Tuesday afternoon, where the Expedition 74 team was about 400 kilometres above Earth.
The two crews discussed their shared experience of being in space, including the food — notably dehydrated sweet and sour chicken, spicy green beans and mango salad.
When the ISS crew asked about the experience of looping around the moon, Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch — who has also been on the space station — said her perspective changed after seeing the Earth from such great distance.
The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission connected with their colleagues on the International Space Station about 370,000 km away on Tuesday, following their historic loop around the moon. It marked the first such moonship-to-spaceship radio linkup, as NASA’s Apollo moon missions in the 1960s and ’70s had no off-the-planet company.
“The thing that changed for me looking back at Earth was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty of the Earth, but how much blackness there was around it, and how it just made it even more special,” she said.
“It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive. We evolved on the same planet. We have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal.”
Commander Reid Wiseman told mission control the call cheered up the whole crew.
“Houston, that was amazing for all four of us. All smiles up here,” he said. “Thank you so much for enabling that. That was very, very special to this crew.”
Toilet troubles
Henfling, the NASA flight director, said Tuesday the capsule has proven “very capable” throughout the trip, and any improvements made for future missions would be relatively small and incremental.
However, the toilet issues persist.
Henfling said the toilet on board remains operational, but the wastewater is not being evacuated properly, and said NASA’s engineering team is still working to figure out the cause of the blockage.
Once the spacecraft is back at the processing facility in Florida, he says, “we’ll be able to get access to all the components” for a detailed analysis “to identify the root cause.”
