Artemis II live updates: NASA astronauts head home after circling the moon in farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth

What do you do after witnessing the indescribable? For Artemis II, it’s all been planned out in advance.

Having completed their lunar fly-by and observations, the Integrity crew are now “cleaning up” their notes and uploading the photos from their camera S.D. cards to send to NASA.

Overnight, NASA’s science team will beaver away going over all the data. When the astronauts wake up in the morning, they’ll hold a conference with the scientists to go over their personal experiences while the memories are still fresh.

After that, it’s all meetings. There will be a public affairs event, a private health check-in with NASA’s medical team, and a flight director conference.

Finally the crew will undertake their “hygiene activities” and eat their dinner before sleeping once again.

Victor Glover is audibly awed as he struggles to describe what he is seeing during the solar eclipse.

“If you’ve ever seen the spotlight off the top of the Luxor at night in Las Vegas, this looks like what that wants to be when it grows up,” he says at one point.

Later, he requests that Mission Control add “about 20 new superlatives” to the English language, so that he has words to capture it.

Here’s an incredible video from NASA of the solar eclipse, giving a tiny sense of what the Artemis II crew witnessed as the sun dipped behind the moon.

But it’s clear that video can’t hold a candle to what the astronauts are actually seeing as they fly through intense darkness.

“I know this observation won’t be of any scientific value, but I’m really glad we launched on April 1. Because humans probably have not evolved to see what we’re seeing,” says pilot Victor Glover said.

“Truly hard to describe. It is amazing… indescribable.”

Glover says the crew have eliminated every possible light source inside the cabin, turning all their screens down as low as they will go to avoid affecting their view of the stars and planets.

“No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of them,” he says.

“It is absolutely spectacular, surreal, there’s no adjectives. I’m going to need to invent some new ones to describe what we’re looking at out this window.”

Integrity has just reestablished bidirectional contact with Houston. And what they’re telling us has got NASA literally dancing on the live stream.

The Artemis II crew has spent the last half hour viewing the eclipse through special goggles, and what they saw was apparently stunning.

“This continues to be unreal,” said pilot Victor Glover as he observed the sun’s corona shining around the edges of the moon. “Wow. It’s amazing.”

Astronauts said they saw the surface of the moon illuminated by “Earthshine” — the sun’s light reflecting off our planet — and vivid views of stars and planets.

“The entire moon is lit-up. It’s glowing behind the entire moon,” said mission specialist Jeremy Hansen. “I thought it would look dark against the black sky or deep space, but the sun is lighting up the entire limb [edge] of the moon. You can see the entire perimeter of it.

The crew also said they saw at least five flashes of meteors impacting the moon — something that Mission Control said made members of its science team “jump up and down, literally”.

On the live stream, one person in the control room could be seen dancing joyfully as Hansen described his observations.

“Even now, with the sun far behind the moon, you can still make up little bit of photography right around the entire limn, just bumps.”

A jar of Nutella spread was seen floating through the capsule during day five of the Artemis mission, and the brand was quick to promote itself being in space.

It is only visible to the crew on the spacecraft and no one on Earth!

For those just joining us, there won’t be any moon landing today. That mission is still in the future.

Its roughly ten-day mission has involved a period in Earth orbit to do systems checks, a powerful “trans-lunar injection” engine burn to catapult the Integrity capsule towards the moon, and a “lunar fly-by” that uses the moon’s gravity to slingshot Integrity round Earth’s largest satellite and back towards home.

“We’ll get eyes on the moon, kind of map it out and then continue to go back in force,” flight director Judd Frielin said before the mission.

During the flyby, the astronauts split into pairs and took turns capturing the lunar views out their windows with cameras. They’d studied and practiced extensively beforehand to know what to look out for.

One highlight of the four-day return trip will be Integrity’s conversation with the International Space Station, where NASA currently has five astronauts.

It’s the first time ever that a moon crew has colleagues in space at the same time, so NASA can’t pass up the opportunity for a cosmic chitchat.

Next year’s Artemis III won’t be landing on the moon either. Its job, as currently planned, is to conduct further tests — including docking with the lunar lander, which will be launched into lunar orbit beforehand.

With the moon in their rear-view mirror, the Artemis II astronauts are now enjoying some well-earned downtime.

Integrity is now oriented away from the moon, meaning there are no more photo opportunities for a little while.

It’s currently around 4,600 miles away from the moon, and around 252,000 miles from earth — the former decreasing, and the latter increasing, every moment.

The spacecraft is also taking the opportunity to charge its batteries from its on-board solar panels. We’re in a “forward link loss of signal” right now, meaning Integrity can’t hear Earth but we can hear them.

Soon, the crew will witness something never seen before by any human being: a solar eclipse as seen from the moon.

Roughly 250,000 miles away from Earth, a little ritual has just taken place to mark Integrity’s return from the dark side of the moon.

On the comms a few minutes ago, Christina Koch said all crew members had now flipped over their mission patches, which are double sided.

Until now, the patches were showing side A: the moon massive in the foreground, the Earth far away in the background.’

But now they’ve been flipped to side B, showing the Earth in the foreground and the moon beyond it. It’s a symbol that the moon is now behind them.

And now, having earlier been in a state of “moon joy”, it’s back to normality. Maintenance checks must be done, including a “a shortened toilet maintenance” routine.