NASA’s Artemis II mission crew entered the Moon’s gravitational sphere early Monday morning, traveling on a trajectory that will soon take them over the Moon’s far and dark side. This marks the farthest humans have ever flown from Earth.
The four astronauts aboard the Orion capsule—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—launched from Florida last week. They are expected to wake at approximately 10:50 a.m. ET on Monday for the sixth day of their flight. By 7:05 p.m., they will reach their maximum distance from Earth of around 252,757 miles, roughly 4,102 miles farther than the Apollo 13 crew held for 56 years.
As they pass over the Moon’s far side, the crew will observe it from about 4,000 miles above its surface, with the Earth appearing as a small basketball-sized globe in the background.
This milestone represents the peak of the nearly 10-day Artemis II mission, NASA’s first crewed test flight under its multi-billion-dollar Artemis program. The program aims to return astronauts to the Moon by 2028 and establish a long-term American presence, including a lunar base to serve as a testbed for future Mars missions.
The flyby around the Moon officially begins at 2:34 p.m. ET and will place the crew temporarily out of communication, as the Moon blocks the link with NASA’s Deep Space Network, a global system of large antennas used to communicate with spacecraft.
The six-hour flyby will also allow astronauts to capture high-resolution photos through Orion’s windows, including dramatic silhouettes of the Moon and rare scientific observations of sunlight skimming its edges, creating eclipse-like effects.
Additionally, they will have the opportunity to photograph Earth rising above the lunar horizon—a reversed perspective of a moonrise as seen from Earth.
Dozens of lunar scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will monitor the mission and record the astronauts’ real-time observations, having trained them to study a range of lunar phenomena during mission preparation.
