Here’s another record that Artemis 2 broke.<\/p>\n
For a few moments on April 6, the four Artemis 2<\/a> moon astronauts and the three crewmates aboard China’s Tiangong space station<\/a> were farther away from each other than any other humans had ever been.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell noted the occasion in a series of X posts<\/a>, in which he calculated the distances between Artemis 2’s Orion<\/a> capsule, named “Integrity,” and Tiangong.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n At first, McDowell highlighted the astronauts aboard the International Space Station<\/a> (ISS) as contenders for the farthest folks from the Artemis 2 quartet. But he amended that statement in a later post, noting that Tiangong was actually slightly more distant.<\/p>\n On April 6, as Integrity flew around the moon’s far side, it got a maximum of 260,754 miles (419,643 kilometers) from Tiangong, according to McDowell. The max Integrity-to-ISS distance, meanwhile, was 260,715.5 miles (419,581 km).<\/p>\n Space.com asked McDowell what made him think to calculate these distances in the first place. “When NASA announced the distance-from-Earth record<\/a>, I immediately wondered if the ISS distance was even further,” he said via email.<\/p>\n “I was going to be too lazy to calculate it, but several people soon after asked the same thing, on social media and in emails to me. So, I went ahead and did it,” he said, adding that NASA’s Johnson Space Center<\/a> in Houston \u2014 Mission Control for Artemis 2 and other crewed NASA spaceflights \u2014 may be interested in verifying his work.<\/p>\n The previous record was set in April 1970 during NASA’s near-disastrous Apollo 13<\/a> mission, whose astronauts pulled off a daring maneuver that used lunar gravity to slingshot them back toward Earth after suffering an explosion en route to the moon<\/a>.<\/p>\n There were no space stations orbiting Earth back then, so the greatest potential distance between humans and crewed moon missions has been extended by a few hundred miles.<\/p>\n Space.com also asked McDowell if he thought this new Artemis 2 record would be significant when future historians look back on it hundreds of years from now.<\/p>\n “To some extent,” McDowell said.<\/p>\n “I think the significance is that it’s the beginning of a shift from ‘How far from Earth are our most distant people’ to ‘How spread out is human civilization?'” he added. “There may come a day when it’s Mercury<\/a> to the moons of Saturn<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here’s another record that Artemis 2 broke. For a few moments on April 6, the four Artemis 2…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607529,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-615448","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615448","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=615448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}