The Manila Times
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The Artemis II astronauts have captured our blue planet’s brilliant beauty as they zoom ever closer to the moon. NASA released the crew’s first downlinked images Friday, 1 1/2 days into the first astronaut moonshot in more than half a century. The first photo taken by Commander Reid Wiseman shows a curved slice of Earth in one of the capsule’s windows. The second shows the entire globe with the oceans topped by swirling white tendrils of clouds. A green aurora even glows, according to NASA. “It’s great to think that with the exception of our four friends, all of us are represented in this image,” said NASA’s Lakiesha Hawkins, an exploration systems leader. She added the mission was going well. As of late Friday afternoon, Wiseman and his crew were more than 110,000 miles (180,000 kilometers) from Earth and were quickly gaining on the moon with another 150,000 miles (240,000 kilometers) to go. They should reach their destination on Monday. The three Americans and one Canadian will swing around the moon in their Orion capsule, hang a U-turn, and then head straight back home without stopping. They fired Orion’s main engine Thursday night that set them on their course. After Mission Control shifted the position of their capsule, the entire Earth, complete with northern lights, filled their windows. “It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks,” Wiseman said in a TV interview. They’re the first lunar travelers since Apollo 17 in 1972. Tests and bugs Since launching 26 hours earlier from Florida, the astronauts spent their first day in space testing cameras, steering their Orion spacecraft, and dealing with small toilet and email issues that were later fixed. They had been in a highly elliptical Earth orbit, swinging them as far as 43,000 miles (64,000 km) away on one end and about 100 miles close on the other, from where the key thruster firing to the moon began, known as the translunar injection burn. The maneuver, which began at 7:49 p.m. ET (2349 GMT), is an orbital exit ramp slinging them out of Earth’s orbit and onto a figure-eight-shaped trajectory toward the moon. It’s the final major thruster firing of the mission, leaving the Orion capsule largely under the influence of orbital mechanics for the remainder of the mission. Wiseman, testing cameras as the crew flew roughly 40,000 miles away from Earth earlier on Thursday, saw the planet as a shrinking sunlit globe, and said taking photos from that distance made it difficult to adjust exposure settings. “It’s like walking out back at your house, trying to take a picture of the moon. That’s what it feels like right now, trying to take a picture of Earth,” he told mission control in Houston as he snapped photos of his home planet with an iPhone. Wiseman earlier faced a minor tech issue when his initial attempts to use Microsoft Outlook to check emails failed, but that was fixed quickly with help from mission control. The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission, which launched from Florida on Wednesday, have a few different devices on board to take photos of space from inside their Orion capsule throughout the flight. They include a small GoPro action camera and iPhones, as well as professional Nikon cameras that have been used by NASA astronauts on the International Space Station for years. The decision to equip the crew with iPhones was made under NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, a billionaire astronaut who flew on two private SpaceX Dragon missions and used the devices during his own flights, NASA officials have said.
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