Humans keep achieving more and more amazing feats. Since 1972, no one had ventured so close to the Moon. But the four astronauts of the Artemis II mission — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — have just made history by becoming the first humans to travel this far from Earth — Apollo reached 400,171 km, while Artemis has arrived at 406,000 km from our planet. They launched aboard the Orion spacecraft on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, and are expected to return to Earth on Friday, April 10, 2026.
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Moon Mission and Record Broken
Just like their predecessors, the Apollo missions, the Artemis missions aim to go further and learn more about space. “We hope that each mission continues to explore and learn new things. Moving away from Earth further than ever before is a fun statistic, but there’s a lot more we’re going to learn during this mission that will be so much more exciting ,” explained Emily Nelson, the Senior Director of Flight at NASA.
On the night of Monday, April 6 to Tuesday, April 7, 2026, the astronauts successfully circled the Moon and got remarkably close, just 6,545 km away. They...
a chance to observe the hidden side of Earth's natural satellite, its surfaces, its craters... " Some of the features that Artemis II observed and described today, no human eye has ever seen them before " clarifies Jenni Gibbons, who managed the communication between Houston and the astronauts, to AFP.
Absolutely unprecedented images
Their close proximity to the Moon and the cutting-edge technologies onboard allowed for the capturing of stunning images of both the Moon and Earth.
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