flying in their Orion capsule since launching from Florida last week<\/a>, reached the moon earlier this week while cruising along a path that took them past the shadowed, lunar far side and then on to become the farthest-flying humans in \u200chistory.<\/p>\nNASA astronauts \u200cReid Wiseman, Victor \u2060Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen are \u200bthe first wave of astronauts in a multibillion-dollar series of missions under the Artemis program.<\/p>\n
It aims to return humans to the moon\u2019s surface by 2028 before China, and establish a long-term US presence over the next decade, building a moon base for potential future missions to Mars.<\/p>\n
Back on Earth, \u2060dozens of lunar scientists have been packed in rooms \u200cadjacent \u200bto NASA\u2019s Mission Control Center in Houston this week, scribbling down notes and debating a \u200bsteady stream of both \u200creal-time and recorded audio from the Artemis II astronaut crew in their Orion spacecraft.<\/p>\n
Advances \u200bin lunar science have typically relied on lunar-orbiting satellites and Earth-based observations.<\/p>\n
But the crew\u2019s six-hour lunar flyby provided a real-time stream of scientific collections from human eyes, allowing \u200brare back-and-forth \u200bdiscussions between teams on the \u200bground and their fellow scientists more than 405,000km \u200caway in deep space.<\/p>\n
Scientists see NASA\u2019s Artemis II mission as an important early step in unlocking mysteries about the solar system\u2019s formation.<\/p>\n
The moon, Artemis II mission specialist Koch said before launching to space last week, is a \u201cwitness plate\u201d to the formation of our solar system.<\/p>\n
The crew\u2019s lunar \u200bsurveying also provides initial takes on what could become future sites for robotic rovers, \u200bwhich NASA hopes to start \u2060flying in rapid succession starting in 2027.<\/p>\n
The press conference is scheduled for later on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four astronauts travelling back from the far \u200cside of the moon on NASA\u2019s Artemis II mission will speak…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-594553","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}