More than half a century after the final Apollo lunar mission, four astronauts have traveled to the vicinity of the moon once again.
NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen, lifted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center last week for a 10-day journey that took them beyond the moon’s far side.
Their trajectory took them farther from Earth than any humans have traveled before, and during a seven-hour flyby, the astronauts could enjoy views of the lunar surface previously unseen by human eyes.
NASA has long billed the Artemis lunar exploration program as a stepping stone for exploring deeper into the cosmos.
Artemis II was a test flight that circumnavigated the moon and did not land on the surface. But it will serve as a pathfinder mission for the uncrewed Artemis III mission, which is expected to touch down near the moon’s largely unexplored south pole.
The Artemis program’s overarching goal is to hash out how humans can permanently live and work on the lunar surface.
