Space exploration once again marked a before and after with a new milestone that expands the limits reached by humanity beyond Earth. The Artemis II mission managed to surpass all records established since the Apollo Program eraby taking his crew to the greatest distance ever traveled by humans in deep space. Aboard the Orion spacecraft, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen left behind the historic mark of Apollo 13, which had held the distance record since 1970. In this context of historic achievement, An emotionally charged moment that the crew experienced during the trip also came to light..
The moment occurred when Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen contacted the mission control team to share a very special proposal: together with his companions, They wanted to name two craters on the Moon that, until then, had not been officially named. The initiative arose in the middle of the trip and was surprising for its symbolic significance within a historical mission.
First of all, they suggested the name “Integrity” for one of the craters located between the Orientale basin and the Ohm crater, as a way to pay tribute to its Orion capsule. “If you look at the crater Orientale on the opposite side and then draw a straight line to Ohm on the other side, relatively in the middle there is an unnamed crater, and we would like to suggest that it be called Integrity,” Hansen explained.
In any case, the most emotional moment came later, when Hansen took the floor to present the second proposal. That’s when the crew of the Artemis II mission shared his desire to name another unnamed crater on the Moon “Carroll”in honor of the deceased wife of Commander Reid Wiseman, a gesture that gave a deeply personal tone to the historic trip.
“There’s a feature in a really interesting place on the Moon, right on the boundary between the visible side and the far side. In fact, it’s right on the visible side of that boundary, so At certain times of lunar transits around the Earth, we will be able to see it from our planet“Hansen began. He then described that point as a “bright spot on the Moon” and, with the accompaniment of the rest of the crew, He proposed naming it Carroll, in memory of Wiseman’s wife, who died in 2020..
As expected, the scene ended up being charged with emotion with a reaction that revealed the most human side of the mission. Commander Reid Wiseman could not hold back his tears as he heard the tributewhile Jeremy Hansen, visibly moved, had to pause and could not continue speaking for a few seconds. Likewise, everything became even more intense when The four astronauts approached and embraced each other. that reflected the depth of the moment they had just experienced.
From NASA’s official Instagram account they shared the moment and expressed: “No matter how far we travel, the people we love always remain with us.”. In addition, they recalled: “The International Astronomical Union is the entity in charge of naming planetary features,” and explained that, although historical figures are generally chosen, “provisional names assigned by astronauts during lunar exploration have also been made official,” as happened with Carroll, as at the time with Mount Marilyn, in honor of Jim Lovell’s wife.
