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Cosmic Space

After the moon, astronauts look homeward – and outward

Stars sparkle in a photo of the Milky Way captured by the Artemis 2 crew. The Large Magellanic Cloud is visible at lower right. (NASA Photo)

After capturing more than 175 gigabytes of data during this week’s lunar flyby, the crew of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission turned their cameras toward the heavens — and turned their hearts toward home.

Pilot Victor Glover told journalists during today’s space-to-ground news conference that he’s been thinking about the return to Earth ever since the day that he was assigned to the crew in 2023.

“At one of the first press conferences, we were asked, ‘What are we looking forward to?’ And I said, ‘Splashdown.’ It’s kind of humorous, but it’s literal as well, that we have to get back,” he said.

From here on out, Glover and his crewmates — commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will be getting ready for their Orion space capsule to hit Earth’s atmosphere at a velocity of 24,500 mph and make a parachute-aided descent to a splashdown off the Southern California coast on Friday, April 10. Coverage of the crew’s return will be streamed via YouTube, with splashdown scheduled for 5:07 p.m. PT.

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Feast your eyes on moon views, from Earthset to eclipse

Wide-angle version of Artemis 2's Earthset photo, with crescent Earth sinking behind the cratered moon
A crescent Earth sinks behind the moon’s disk in a wide-angle version of the Artemis 2 crew’s “Earthset” picture. (NASA Photo)

A day after the Artemis 2 mission’s lunar flyby, NASA has released a stunning set of high-resolution images documenting Earthset and Earthrise, a solar eclipse that set the moon aglow, and other views of the lunar far side and the astronauts who took the pictures.

The photos were taken during a seven-hour lunar observation period at the farthest point of the Orion space capsule’s 10-day odyssey. The mission marked the first crewed trip around the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the farthest-ever voyage by space travelers (252,756 miles from Earth, and more than 4,000 miles beyond the moon).

The Earthset photo was captured just as our home planet was sinking beneath the lunar horizon, followed about 40 minutes later by a picture of Earth rising on the other side of the moon. The pictures rekindled the spirit of NASA’s original Earthrise photo, taken by astronaut Bill Anders during Apollo 8’s round-the-moon mission in 1968.

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Starfish Space raises $110M for satellite servicing

Illustration: Starfish Space's Otter in geostationary Earth orbit with Earth in background
An artist’s conception shows Starfish Space’s Otter satellite servicing vehicle in geostationary Earth orbit. (Starfish Space Illustration)

Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space says it has raised about $110 million in a funding round that will help the company execute its first satellite servicing missions and scale up operations for more business.

The Series B round was led by Point72 Ventures. Activate Capital and Shield Capital were co-leaders of the round. Additional major participants included Industrious Ventures and NightDragon. The round also drew support from several existing Starfish investors (NFX, Munich Re Ventures, Toyota Ventures and PSL Ventures) as well as new investors (Nomi Capital, Gaingels and Overlap Holdings).

The new capital adds to previous funding rounds announced in 2021, 2023 and 2024, and pushes Starfish’s total investment past the $150 million mark.

Starfish Space was founded in 2019 by engineers Austin Link and Trevor Bennett, two veterans of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. The company has developed a space vehicle called Otter, which is designed to rendezvous and dock with other objects in orbit — either to maneuver them into a different orbit or guide them to safe disposal.

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Artemis 2’s moon crew sets a cosmic distance record

Earthset photo from Artemis 2: Crescent Earth dips beneath lunar horizon
NASA’s Artemis 2 crew captured an iconic “Earthset” picture, showing Earth dipping beneath the lunar horizon. (NASA Photo)

Four astronauts today became the first humans to make a trip around the moon since the Apollo era — and added new pages to history books for the Artemis era.

The Artemis 2 crew reached a maximum distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing the distance record for human travel that was set during the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 by more than 4,000 miles.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch marked the occasion in a radio transmission from NASA’s Orion space capsule, named Integrity. “We most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,” she said.

Koch made history as the first woman to travel beyond Earth orbit. One of her crewmates, NASA pilot Victor Glover, is the first Black astronaut to take a moon trip, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen is the first non-U.S. astronaut to do so.

The main purpose of the 10-day Artemis 2 mission is to serve as an initial crewed test flight for the Orion spacecraft, which traced a similar round-the-moon course during the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission in 2022. A successful Artemis 2 mission will prepare the way for a lunar lander test flight in Earth orbit as early as next year, potentially followed in 2028 by the first crewed moon landing since Apollo.

Seattle-area tech workers have played a role in getting Orion off the ground — and bringing it back home. L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne facility in Redmond worked on the spacecraft’s main engine and some of its thrusters, while Karman Space Systems’ Mukilteo facility provided mechanisms for Orion’s parachute deployment system and emergency hatch release system.

Artemis 2’s flight plan took advantage of orbital mechanics and a precisely timed firing of Orion’s main engine to send the astronauts on a free-return trip around the moon and back. The moon’s gravitational pull caused Orion to make a crucial U-turn around the far side, at a minimum distance of 4,067 miles from the lunar surface, and then slingshot back toward Earth.

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Cosmic Space

How to watch the Artemis crew fly around the moon

Moon centered in window of Orion spacecraft, surrounded by cabin hardware
The moon shines through one of the Orion spacecraft's windows on April 5. Click for a larger image. (NASA Photo)

It’s prime time for the Artemis 2 mission’s historic round-the-moon flyby, which includes setting a new distance record for human travel beyond Earth and laying eyes on a supersized solar eclipse.

The lunar encounter on April 6 will mark the first time astronauts have traveled to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. They won’t be landing this time, but they will be getting a close look at features on the lunar far side that human eyes have never seen directly before.

Artemis 2’s Orion space capsule is on a slingshot trajectory that will take advantage of the moon’s gravitational field to execute a U-turn and head back toward Earth without the need for a major engine burn.

The show starts at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT) on NASA+, YouTube and other streaming video services.

“I do anticipate a big bump … as we have this really key moment in time where we’re flying around,” Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said today. “We’re breaking the Apollo record. We’re going to have an eclipse, we’re going to have all of these amazing observations. I really think we’re going to get another big spike. I’m really looking forward to that.”

But it will take hours for the flyby to run its course. It will take hours more for the crew to download the imagery they capture, and it’s likely to take days longer to share all the fruits of the six-hour flyby sequence with the public. The sense of drama won’t be as high as it was for, say, the “Apollo 13” movie. But Kelsey Young, Artemis 2’s lunar science lead, says it will be an important event nonetheless.

“This is a unifying moment for all of us, and we’ve put our best foot forward into preparing this mission for success,” she said. “We know what it’s going to mean to connect to the moon in that way.”

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Orion crosses the halfway point in journey to the moon

Closeup picture of Orion spacecraft en route to moon
Orion snapped this selfie in space with a camera mounted on one of its solar array wings during a routine inspection. (NASA Photo)

NASA’s Artemis 2 astronauts are well past the halfway point in their trip from Earth to the moon — the first such trip in more than 50 years. Today they and the rest of the Artemis team fine-tuned their plans for documenting the crucial lunar fly-around just two days ahead.

The Orion space capsule, christened Integrity, closed within 100,000 miles of the moon today. When the astronauts reach the farthest point of their figure-8 trajectory on April 6, they’re projected to be 252,757 miles from Earth.

That will break the distance record set in 1970 by the crew of the Apollo 13 mission (248,655 miles). And that means Artemis 2’s crew — NASA mission commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will officially become the farthest-out humans in history.

You can check Orion’s current position using NASA’s Artemis Real-time Orbit Website, or AROW.

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Rubin Observatory team discovers 11,000 new asteroids

Visualization of asteroids discovered by Rubin Observatory in the inner solar system
A model of the inner solar system shows asteroids discovered by the Rubin Observatory in light teal. Previously known asteroids are dark blue. The model highlights almost 12,700 asteroids that the Rubin team has discovered over the course of a year and a half. (Photo: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC / AURA / R. Proctor. Star map: NASA / GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio. Gaia DR2: ESA / Gaia / DPAC. Image Processing: M. Zamani / NSF NOIRLab)

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s science team has discovered more than 11,000 new asteroids — a feat made possible by the Simonyi Survey Telescope’s advanced capabilities and data-crunching software developed at the University of Washington.

Rubin’s deluge of discoveries, based on a million early-stage observations that were collected over the course of a month and a half last summer, includes roughly 380 trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, and 33 previously unknown near-Earth objects. (Don’t panic: None of those near-Earth objects poses a threat to Earth.)

The data set also includes more than 80,000 previously known asteroids, some of which had been “lost” to science because of uncertainty about their orbits. The findings were confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, the global clearinghouse for small solar system objects.

These aren’t the first finds for the $800 million observatory in Chile, which made its “First Look” debut last June. Astronomers previously reported finding more than 1,500 asteroids during earlier test rounds.

“This first large submission after Rubin First Look is just the tip of the iceberg and shows that the observatory is ready,” UW astronomer Mario Jurić, who heads Rubin’s solar system team, said in a news release. “What used to take years or decades to discover, Rubin will unearth in months. We are beginning to deliver on Rubin’s promise to fundamentally reshape our inventory of the solar system and open the door to discoveries we haven’t yet imagined.”

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Moon-bound astronauts capture glorious views of Earth

Full-disk view of Earth
This full-disk view of Earth was taken by NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft's windows on April 2. (NASA Photo)

NASA’s Artemis 2 astronauts are sharing perspectives of Earth that haven’t been seen by human eyes for more than 50 years — from a spaceship that’s traveling from our home planet to the moon.

Two days after the launch of the crew’s Orion space capsule, the first high-resolution photos looking back at Earth are hitting NASA’s image repository. “You guys look great,” astronaut Christina Koch said.

Today’s star of the show is a blue-marble photo captured by mission commander Reid Wiseman after Orion completed its translunar injection burn and headed outward from Earth orbit on April 2. The faint greenish glint of auroras can be seen at upper right and lower left. The brighter glow of zodiacal light is visible at lower right.

“You could see the entire globe, from pole to pole,” Wiseman said during a news briefing. “You could see Africa, Europe, and if you looked really close, you could see the northern lights. It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks.”

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Orion moonship fires up its engine to leave Earth behind

Orion thrusters and crescent Earth against the blackness of space
A webcam view from NASA's Orion space capsule shows its thrusters at left and a crescent Earth at right. (NASA Photo)

NASA’s Orion space capsule successfully fired its main engine today for a maneuver that sent the four astronauts of the Artemis 2 mission out of Earth orbit and onward to the moon.

The translunar injection burn lasted five minutes and 50 seconds, and committed the spacecraft to a course that will result in a lunar flyby and a gravity-assisted U-turn on April 6. “Looks like a good burn,” capsule communicator Chris Birch said at Mission Control in Houston.

The trajectory is designed so that the capsule, christened Integrity, will return to Earth on April 10 without requiring any further major engine firings. “From this point forward, the laws of orbital mechanics are going to carry our crew to the moon, around the far side and back to Earth,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.

After the burn, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen paid tribute to the Artemis team. “We firmly felt the power of your perseverance during every second of that burn,” he told Mission Control. “Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of, and it’s your hopes for the future that carry us now on this journey around the moon.”

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Astronauts begin first trip to the moon in decades

SLS lifts off from Florida launch pad
NASA’s Space Launch System rises from its Florida launch pad, sending the Artemis 2 crew into orbit. (NASA via YouTube)

After years of postponements and close to $100 billion in spending, NASA has launched the first mission to send astronauts around the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The 10-day Artemis 2 mission began today with the liftoff of NASA’s 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. ET (3:35 p.m. PT). NASA is streaming live coverage of the flight via YouTube and Amazon Prime.

During the last two hours of the countdown, engineers addressed concerns about the rocket’s flight termination system and instrumentation for a battery on the launch abort system. “Godspeed, Artemis 2,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson told the crew just before liftoff. “Let’s go!”

Artemis 2 is the first crewed test flight in a series leading up to a moon landing that’s currently scheduled for 2028. It follows Artemis 1, which sent a crewless Orion around the moon in 2022. This time, four astronauts are riding inside Orion: NASA mission commander Reid Wiseman, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

“Great view,” Wiseman told Mission Control during the rocket’s ascent. “We have a beautiful moonrise, we’re headed right at it.”

Koch will be the first woman to go beyond Earth orbit. Similar firsts apply to Glover as a Black astronaut, and Hansen as a non-American astronaut.

Although Artemis 2’s astronauts won’t be landing on the lunar surface, they’ll follow a figure-8 trajectory that will send them 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the moon and make them the farthest-flung travelers in human history.

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