5 Notable Things That Happened to Artemis II in the Last 24 Hours

The Artemis II mission is still well underway and the crew, consisting of three Americans and a Canadian, are now halfway through their journey to the moon. They have now left Earth orbit far behind them and the next big phase is to enter the orbit around the Moon. This is expected to take place on Sunday into Monday.

Fortunately, the toilet problem was quickly resolved

Have you ever thought about what it’s like in a rocket when you have to go to the toilet? I think we might not want to think about it, especially knowing that the toilet was broken for a moment. Of course it is not a beautiful pot as we know here, it is a ‘moon toilet’ and it did not work. The result? The astronauts had to toilet in a bag (with a funnel). Oh dear. Fortunately, Christina Koch was able to ensure that the toilet worked again under guidance from Houston. There is still one problem left: it is very cold at 18 degrees, so people are now trying to regulate that from Earth. Fortunately, the astronauts can put on a layer of extra clothing.

Outlook problems even follow you into space

Outlook is an email program that occasionally makes you want to throw your laptop out the window. Of course they can’t do that in such a spacecraft, so they just have to solve the problems. Commander Reid Wiseman (who also took the snapshots you see below) reported to the control center in Houston that he saw two Microsoft Outlooks and both were not working. Fortunately, NASA was able to take over the computer from Earth and solve the problem, so that emails can once again be sent from 230,000 kilometers from Earth.

The beautiful photos of the earth

If there’s one thing that often drives people to take better care of our planet, it’s seeing images of the Earth. It seems that it suddenly makes you realize that we live on a planet and that you would like to protect it. Now we have to say: Earth also looks beautiful in the new photos called Hello, World. For example, we see the Atlantic Ocean in the first photo and even a small Venus in the bottom right. In the second photo you can see the difference between the Earth during day and night. In the third photo, the night on Earth is only lit by the moon. And then there is a funny photo where the Earth seems to be looking into the Orion and finally the photo where you see what it is like now (left) and what it was like in 1972 (right). That gives you pause, doesn’t it?

Everything is going according to plan

Also an important thing to keep an eye on: is everything going as NASA planned? Certainly! The capsule is still going in the right direction, although it will of course be especially exciting when the orbit around the moon is reached and the Orion has to be steered. To be honest, this day is the most boring day of the mission in terms of activities, but as you have read above, the astronauts do not have to sit still. Tomorrow it will be more exciting, when spacesuits will be tested and they will notice how great the gravitational pull of the moon is…

You can view the tracker

Did you know that there is a tracker live that you can totally nerd out with? It’s about the Artemis II tracker and at the time of writing, the astronauts are going 3,733 kilometers per hour and are 284,333 kilometers from Earth. They only have 174,678 kilometers to go to the moon. You can see, among other things, how big the Earth appears from where they are, how much delay the signal has, which part of the Earth they see, and you can even see that the crew is waking up at this moment and going to have breakfast, with another check-in moment with Houston in 2 hours and 17 minutes. It’s really cool to keep an eye on it all, this is the furthest journey we have ever made as humanity.