NASA's Artemis II crew woke up on Easter Sunday to day five of their mission with a snippet from CeeLo Green's "Working Class Heroes (Work)," then heard from Apollo 16 moon walker Charlie Duke as the four astronauts continued their pioneering trip around the moon. Later in the day, Orion executed an outbound trajectory correction burn at 11:03 P.M. EDT and entered the lunar sphere of influence at 12:41 A.M. Monday.
That crew — Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen and Victor Glover — also turned Easter into a scavenger hunt, finding caches of dehydrated scrambled eggs stashed around the cabin. The lighter moments sat beside a hard test of the Orion crew survival system, better known as the bright-orange space suits. Wiseman and Glover tried to quickly don and pressurize the suits as if they were in an emergency, climbed into their seats wearing them and tested eating and drinking through a small port in each helmet.
Duke's message carried the weight of another era. "Below you on the moon is a photo of my family," he told the crew, adding, "I pray it reminds you that we in America and all of the world are cheering you on." He thanked them and the team on the ground for "building on our Apollo legacy with Artemis," and closed with "Godspeed, and safe travels home." Duke left a personal memento on the lunar surface in 1972, and his greeting linked the old moon landings to the one now under way.
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The suits are designed to protect the astronauts during launch and splashdown, and can provide up to six days of air if Orion were to depressurize in space. That same mission is now approaching the point where the numbers start to matter more than the ceremony. At 1:56 P.M., Artemis II is expected to surpass the distance record set in 1970 by Apollo 13. The crew's lunar observation period is set to begin at 2:45 P.M. on day six and last about six hours, with the astronauts expected to study the moon from as close as 4,070 miles above its surface and target about 35 lunar sites for photography. At 8:35 P.M., they are expected to see a solar eclipse from space.
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Artemis II will reach its maximum distance from Earth at 7:07 P.M., when it is expected to be 252,760 miles away, farther than any humans have ever traveled from Earth. That is the point of the flight now: not just to circle the moon, but to prove the ship, the suits and the crew can handle the most distant human journey ever attempted and bring them home again.
