Where is Artemis II now? NASA mission is now closer to the Moon than Earth

The third day of Artemis II the mission was relatively quiet, as four astronauts set off to fly around the moon

By Meghan Bartels edited by Lee Billings

NASA launched four astronauts on a pioneering journey around the Moon: the Artemis II assignment. Follow our coverage here.

The four NASA astronauts Artemis II the mission has passed half of its journey to the moon. At 9 a.m. PDT on April 4, the Orion spacecraft was more than 100,000 miles from Earth, less than 120,000 miles from the Moon, and traveling at about 2,540 miles per hour.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen started their day to the sound of “In a Daydream” by the Freddy Jones Band.

“It was really cool to wake up this morning and look out the window and see the full moon out the front of the vehicle,” Wiseman said, concluding the morning’s planning conference with Mission Control in Houston. “There’s no doubt where we’re going right now.”

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The crew had a “snow day,” as Koch called it, following the originally planned orbital trajectory, which NASA determined was not necessary to refine the Orion vehicle’s location. The next trajectory burn is expected to take place Saturday evening, at the start of the fourth day of the mission.

Even without burning, the Artemis II the crew had a busy day full of activities. The most important were probably their first private conversations with family since leaving Earth on Wednesday. The astronauts also spent half an hour exercising, an essential task to ensure their health in microgravity.

Many of the day’s activities were related to health in space. For example, Glover, Koch and Hansen performed CPR in space, taking turns leaning against Orion’s bulkhead for leverage to simulate chest compressions and rescue respirations while recording the procedures for future crew training. Wiseman and Glover also tested the Orion Medical Kit’s thermometer, blood pressure monitor, stethoscope and otoscope (the tool that allows doctors to examine a patient’s ear).

Another key achievement of the third flight day was a successful test of emergency communications between Orion and NASA’s Deep Space Network. This network links large telescope antennas in California, Australia and Spain that cooperate to stay in contact with spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit.

Additionally, the astronauts set up their cameras and practiced observations planned for Monday’s moon flyby, when the capsule will pass about 4,000 miles from our satellite. Orion is a small space for four people, so crew members have careful choreography to maximize the data the astronauts can collect.

Their preparations for scanning the moon will continue until the fourth day; for example, each crew member will examine the lunar geographic features they are supposed to photograph during the flyby. Of course, all four astronauts studied the Moon extensively during their preparation for the mission, but the precise date and time of the launch determined the specific features each would target during their all-too-fleeting close encounter, making this time for examination a necessity.

All this work is well and good, but perhaps the highlight for us Earthlings of this day’s mission will be a 20-minute block dedicated to photographing celestial bodies through the windows of the Orion spacecraft.