CALGARY — The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission is set to make history on Monday night as they fly past the moon at the closest distance humans have reached in more than half a century.According to Bloomberg, the crew of four astronauts will conduct a flyby just after 7 p.m. EDT, when the spacecraft will pass within roughly 4,066 miles of the lunar surface — the closest any human has traveled since the Apollo era.The mission, which launched on April 1, includes NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, making him the first Canadian ever to journey to the moon..Before reaching the moon, the Artemis II crew will also break another record, surpassing the distance traveled by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 — a milestone expected to occur around 2 p.m. EDT.NASA officials have downplayed the importance of the record itself, with Emily Nelson, NASA's chief flight director, having told the media ahead of the launch that, “You want every mission to keep exploring and keep learning new things, and getting farther from Earth than we’ve ever been before is a fun statistic. But there are a lot of other things we’re going to learn on this mission that are going to be a lot more exciting.”The flyby is set to begin earlier in the afternoon when the Orion spacecraft rotates to give the astronauts a direct view of the moon’s surface — a vantage point that will make the moon appear about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length.“It turns out there’s about 60% of the far side, I think, that has never been seen by human eyes because of the lighting conditions,” Wiseman, the commander of the Artemis II mission, said before launch.“Apollo always wanted that light on the front side of the moon for their landing and launch capabilities.”.The crew is expected to capture images of the far side of the moon as well, which is an area never visible from Earth and still largely unseen by human eyes.NASA scientists hope the crew’s observations will provide new insights into the moon’s geological history.By studying surface features under varying angles and light conditions, researchers aim to better understand how the lunar surface evolved over time.“The human eye, especially when it’s connected to a well-trained brain, which I assure you these four people have, is capable of, in the blink of an eye, making nuanced colour observations that Apollo observations told us can tell us something scientifically,” Kelsey Young, NASA’s Artemis science flight operations lead, said during a Saturday news conference.During the flyby, the spacecraft will experience a communications blackout as it travels behind the far side of the moon, which is expected to last roughly 40 minutes, similar to blackouts that occurred during the Apollo missions and the un-crewed Artemis I voyage.
