The NASA Artemis II mission is set to break the record for the furthest distance traveled by humans from Earth this Monday, a milestone that has been held for over 56 years by Apollo 13, as reported by the AP agency.
The Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by its crew, will perform a lunar flyby this Monday lasting approximately six hours, following a figure-eight trajectory, the same route taken by Apollo 13 in 1970 to rescue its astronauts after an oxygen tank exploded.
The commander Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert achieved a maximum distance of 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from Earth on April 15, 1970, a record that Artemis II will surpass by about 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers), reaching an estimated distance of 252,757 miles (406,773 kilometers).
The current crew consists of Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen, who were launched last Tuesday from launch pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard the SLS rocket.
Koch pointed out at the end of last week that she and her colleagues do not thrive on superlatives, but that this is an important milestone "that people can understand and relate to".
The crew of the Artemis II mission captured this Sunday an unprecedented image of the Orientale basin, a geological formation situated on the far western edge of the lunar disk that has never before been seen in its entirety by human eyes.
NASA shared the photograph on its official account on X with the message: "History in the making. In this new image of our Artemis II crew, you can see the Orientale basin on the right edge of the lunar disk. This mission marks the first time the entire basin has been seen with human eyes."
Similarly, they released a series of unpublished images taken during their journey to the Moon, providing views that had not been seen since the Apollo program era over 53 years ago.
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