WASHINGTON: NASA announced on Friday that the four astronauts on the Artemis mission have passed the halfway point between Earth and the Moon on their planned lunar flyby.
Mission control told the crew at around 11 pm local time (0400 GMT) that “you are now closer to the Moon than you are to us on Earth,” during the agency’s live broadcast.
Astronaut Christina Koch described the moment as a joyful milestone, saying, “We all kind of had a collective, I guess, expression of joy at that… We can see the Moon out of the docking hatch right now, it is a beautiful sight.”
The milestone occurred approximately two days, five hours, and 24 minutes after liftoff. NASA’s online dashboard showed the Orion spacecraft carrying the crew is now more than 219,000 kilometres (136,080 miles) from Earth.
NASA confirmed on social media, “We’re halfway there.”
The next milestone for the spacecraft is entering the lunar sphere of influence, expected on the fifth day of the flight. The astronauts — Americans Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen — are currently on a “free-return” trajectory, which will use the Moon’s gravity to slingshot around it before returning to Earth without propulsion.
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