The Orion capsule carrying four astronauts on Nasa’s Artemis II mission fired thrusters early yesterday, propelling the crew out of Earth’s orbit and onto a path toward the moon, committing them to the farthest distance humans have ever traveled in space.
The successful maneuver put the crew on a path to enter the moon’s sphere of gravitational influence by Sunday morning, as they prepare to beat the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970.
“We are getting just a beautiful view of the dark side of the Earth lit by the moon right now. Phenomenal,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen told mission control some 10 minutes after the thruster firing.
Since launching 26 hours earlier from Florida, the astronauts spent their first day in space testing cameras, steering their Orion spacecraft and dealing with small toilet and email issues that were later fixed.
They had been in a highly elliptical Earth orbit swinging them as far as 43,000 miles (64,000 km) away on one end and about 100 miles close on the other, from where the key thruster firing to the moon began, known as the translunar injection burn.
The maneuver, which began at 7:49 pm ET (2349 GMT), is an orbital exit ramp slinging them out of Earth’s orbit and onto a figure-eight-shaped trajectory toward the moon. It’s the final major thruster firing of the mission, leaving the Orion capsule largely under the influence of orbital mechanics for the remainder of the mission.
Commander Reid Wiseman, testing cameras as the crew flew roughly 40,000 miles away from Earth earlier on Thursday, saw the planet as a shrinking sunlit globe, and said taking photos from that distance made it difficult to adjust exposure settings.
“It’s like walking out back at your house, trying to take a picture of the moon. That’s what it feels like right now trying to take a picture of Earth,” he told mission control in Houston as he snapped photos of his home planet with an iPhone.
Wiseman earlier faced a minor tech issue when his initial attempts to use Microsoft Outlook to check emails failed, but that was fixed quickly with help from mission control.
