Artemis II captures week
NASA highlighted a week of solar‑system captures made during the Artemis II Moon mission, sharing a fresh batch of images and mission updates this week. The space agency’s social post about the mission’s recent captures attracted attention on social platforms (x.com).
NASA spent this week pushing out a new batch of Artemis II imagery from the crew’s April 6 lunar flyby, including an “Earthset” view and closeups from the Moon’s far side. (nasa.gov) The mission itself is over: Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026, splashed down on April 10, and lasted 9 days, 1 hour, 32 minutes. NASA says it was the first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years. (nasa.gov) The four-person crew was NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. NASA said they returned to Johnson Space Center in Houston on April 15 after the Pacific recovery. (nasa.gov) A lunar flyby is a swing around the Moon rather than a landing, using the Moon’s gravity to bend the spacecraft back toward Earth. NASA used Artemis II to test Orion, the capsule built to carry astronauts to deep space and return them safely. (nasa.gov) The most circulated image was taken at 6:41 p.m. Eastern on April 6, when Orion was nearing the far side of the Moon. NASA said the photo shows a crescent Earth setting beyond the lunar horizon, with Australia and Oceania on the sunlit side. (nasa.gov) NASA’s flyby gallery says the image set also includes views of the Moon’s far side and an in-space solar eclipse captured during a seven-hour observation period. The agency released the first batch on April 7 and added more material this week through its Artemis II multimedia hub. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2) During the April 6 pass, Orion went behind the Moon for a planned 40-minute loss of signal. NASA said the spacecraft came within about 4,067 miles of the surface and reached 252,756 miles from Earth, a new human-distance record that passed Apollo 13’s mark. (nasa.gov) The pictures are also part of NASA’s case for what comes next. On its Artemis II pages, the agency says the flight was a crewed test run for later Moon missions, and its latest post-mission update says Kennedy Space Center teams have already shifted hardware and ground systems work toward Artemis III, which NASA is targeting for next year. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2) For now, the mission’s public afterlife is arriving one frame at a time: galleries, wallpapers, and postflight briefings built around a ten-day trip that put humans back at the Moon for the first time since 1972. (nasa.gov 1) (nasa.gov 2)
