And as a matter of historical significance, this will be the furthest humans have ever travelled from Earth. We've existed for 300,000 years (homo sapiens), and no human has ever gone as far from this rock as these 4 people are about to do.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] elephantium@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

I did some looking and found this question on Stackexchange. The diagram was super helpful for me -- it's pretty intuitive to see where the mission is going.

Also, thanks for posting that article! It had a reference to http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-112622a-artemis-i-breaks-apollo-13-distance-earth-record.html which cited the actual records (talking about Artemis I, not II):

The uncrewed Orion flew past the record-setting distance achieved by the Apollo 13 command module "Odyssey" at 248,655 miles from Earth (216,075 nautical miles or 400,171 kilometers) at about 8:40 a.m. EST (1340 GMT) on Saturday (Nov. 26).

The Apollo 13 spacecraft had previously set the record on April 14, 1970, at 7:21 p.m. EST (0021 GMT on April 15).

...

NASA expects the Artemis I capsule to reach a maximum distance from Earth of 268,553 miles (432,194 km) at 4:06 p.m. EST (2106 GMT) on Monday (Nov. 28).

So they're actually going 32,000km past the previous record. It's interesting that they're using such a far-flung lunar orbit.