NASA’s Artemis II mission reached a historic milestone this Monday, 6th, when it flew over the moon and set a new distance record from Earth. During the six-hour maneuver around the Moon, the four astronauts: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen and Christina Koch observed unprecedented views of the far side of the satellite and surpassed the record set by the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970 by more than six thousand kilometers.
The mission uses the same free return trajectory adopted by Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank explosion. The route takes advantage of the gravity of the Earth and the Moon, reducing the need for fuel and automatically placing the capsule back towards the planet.
During the 40-minute period in which it was behind the Moon and without communication with Earth, Artemis II reached its maximum distance of 406,771 kilometers, traveling at around 5,052 km/h. The previous milestone was from the Apollo 13 mission: 400,171 kilometers.
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The return should end with landing in the Pacific Ocean, next Friday.
On board, the astronauts carried a silk emblem from Apollo 8, Jim Lovell’s mission, which also recorded the crew’s awakening message before he died last August. Among the mission’s scientific targets are the Orientale Basin, the Apollo 12 and 14 landing sites and the lunar south pole region, a priority for future missions.
Artemis II is NASA’s first manned mission to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and paves the way for Artemis III and a later lunar landing, scheduled for Artemis IV, in 2028.
