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HOUSTON — Astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft Integrity swung around the far side of the Moon April 6, offering insights and observations of lunar surface features, including regions never before seen by human eyes.

The 6.5-hr. flyby, which began at 2:45 p.m., was the highlight of the ongoing nine-day Artemis II flight test, which primarily is intended as a trial run of a Lockheed Martin-built Orion spacecraft with crew.

NASA plans to follow Artemis II with a mid-2027 crewed mission in low Earth orbit to test Orion’s ability to rendezvous, dock and undock with lunar landers needed to ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the Moon beginning in 2028.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen successfully combined Artemis II science and flight test objectives as they swept behind the far side of the Moon for unprecedented human observations of the lunar terrain.

Shortly before the start of the science surveys, Integrity broke the distance record for a human spaceflight set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970. “As we surpass the furthest distance humans have ever traveled from planet Earth, we do so in honoring the extraordinary efforts and feats of our predecessors in human space exploration,” Wiseman radioed to Mission Control in Houston.

“We challenge this generation, and the next, to make sure this record is not long-lived,” he added.

The crew also proposed to name two craters on the Moon, one after their spaceship Integrity and the other after Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Wiseman, who died of cancer in 2020.

Integrity was on track to continue its outbound journey for another 4,111 mi., before gravitational forces of the Moon and Earth begin tugging Orion back for a four-day return journey ending with splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at 8:06 p.m. EDT April 10.

Artemis II launched at 6:35 p.m. EDT April, returning NASA to deep-space crewed exploration for the first time since the 1969-72 Apollo program.

“I sent a note to the workforce at NASA and all our partners … thanking everyone who contributed to getting the vehicle ready to get out on the pad to launch—acknowledging the contributions that will come from Mission Control and our teams, the recovery forces that will bring these astronauts home, out of the water and back home,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters in Wichita, Kansas, where he was touring some Artemis program suppliers’ facilities.

“For everybody else,” he added, “I said it’s time to start thinking about Artemis III. During the Apollo era, on Apollo 10, when those astronauts were orbiting just miles above the Moon, you had everybody else getting ready for Apollo 11 that launched two months later, right?”

Working with a team of scientists at the Johnson Space Center, the Artemis II astronauts had a Lunar Targeting Plan that included observations of the color, albedo, topography and surface texture of up to 35 targets of interest on the lunar near and far side. The regions include the dual craters Glushko and Ohm, the Aristarchus Plateau, a gathering of bright surface swirls known as Reiner Gamma and the Orientale basin—the youngest large impact basin on the Moon.

“When you look at the Moon, all the really bright new craters—some of them are super tiny, most of them are pretty small, and there’s a couple that really stand out—look like a lampshade that has tiny pinprick holes and the light shining through,” Koch radioed to the Artemis II science team.  “They’re so bright compared to the rest of the Moon.”

The astronauts also had opportunities to respond to targets of their choosing for observations.

Glover, for instance, noted what he described as a challenging terrain at the lunar south pole, a region NASA has prioritized for the first Artemis-era landing with astronauts, Artemis IV, in 2028. The region is believed to contain substantial subsurface water ice deposits that could support future lunar exploration and development efforts.

“You are describing new views of a Moon in more ways than one,” Kelsey Young, NASA’s Artemis II lunar science lead, told Glover.

“We are very excited to get these observations, particularly how humans on board get to complement the robotic exploration that goes on by NASA,” NASA’s Lori Glaze, the agency’s Artemis Program lead, told reporters ahead of the April 6 lunar flyby.

“The Moon and Earth are fundamentally made of the same material. In the way back, the Earth was hit by a Mars-sized object and it was a massive collision that left a lot of debris out in space and coalesced into what is now the Earth and Moon.

“Our whole Earth/Moon system is literally made up of the same materials. Although Earth has gone through lots of evolution with plate tectonics and weathering, the Moon has been there as a witness plate to see everything that has happened over the 4.5 billion years we have been around,” she said.