NASA’s Artemis II mission is well past the halfway point on its journey to the moon, and already, space agency officials and the crew are looking forward to and preparing for the lunar flyby. In this hours-long period on April 6, the astronauts will have the chance to observe the moon’s far side, including features humans have never seen with their eyes.
The four-astronaut crew—Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman—crossed the halfway mark to the moon around 9 A.M. EDT on Saturday.
At a press conference on Saturday, Kelsey Young, lunar science lead for the Artemis II mission at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said that scientists are eagerly awaiting the lunar observations. Only when the spacecraft has made it to the moon will it be entirely clear what the astronauts will be able to see. But among the potential targets she is most excited about is the Orientale Basin—an impact crater three times as wide as Massachusetts.
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“This is an impact basin that played such a critical role in not just lunar science but in planetary and solar system science,” she said. “It's the type impact basin we use to understand impact processes across the solar system, which is one of the most ubiquitous processes across the entire solar system. And we’ve never had human eyes on, by far, the majority of it.”
The astronauts are spending part of Saturday reviewing potential targets for observations. The opportunities for science abound, such as the spectacular sight of a solar eclipse, when the moon will fully obstruct the sun from view. The crew will also spend much of the flyby taking photographs of the moon’s far side, many features of which they’ll be the first humans to see by eye (earlier crewed flybys occurred during the lunar night).
Young explained that the crew have been extensively trained to observe the moon’s far side features and the science objectives. Among the most critical observations, she said, will be those of different colors and topography that satellites might miss. The crew members have spent the past several months studying flash cards that the science team made them for identifying key lunar features on sight, she added.
At the same event, John Honeycutt, program manager of the Space Launch System (SLS), which lofted Artemis II into space, touted the precision of the SLS launch and the positioning of the Orion crew capsule into Earth orbit. “It did that—with 99.92 percent accuracy,” he said. “That was a big bull’s-eye, and I’m very happy about that.” Since leaving Earth orbit, Orion has been able to stay on its trajectory to the moon with surprising accuracy.
The capsule’s toilet, however, is not doing as well. An overnight wastewater dump seemed to cut off too early, as if the line were clogged with ice because of the cold environment. “We think it’s probably been seeing more shadow than anticipated,” said Debbie Korth, deputy program director of Orion, at the same event.
The capsule was tilted to try and give the wastewater system a warm bath in the sun’s blistering rays—with middling success. “By heating [it] up, we were able to get some of the urine out but clearly didn’t solve the whole problem,” Korth said.
In the meantime, the crew is using their “collapsible contingency urine devices” to avoid introducing more wastewater into the tank until the lines are clear (they’re still using the toilet for number two). Korth pointed out that ice is a perennial plumbing issue for moon missions, going back to NASA’s shuttle program.
Toilet troubles aside, in an interview with CBS on Saturday, the astronauts spoke about the mission’s symbolic importance for all those watching from Earth.
“When I saw Earth for the first time on its own out the window, I was struck by the blackness around it,” Koch said. “For me it leads back to gratitude—that out of this huge universe, we get to live together on planet Earth, and what an anomaly that is.”