Houston ¨C The four astronauts of NASA¡¯s Artemis II mission flew deeper into space on Monday than any humans before them, as they cruised through a rare flyby of the shadowed far side of the moon that revealed a lunar surface under cosmic bombardment.
The six-hour survey of the normally hidden hemisphere of Earth¡¯s only natural satellite was highlighted by the astronauts¡¯ direct visual observations of ¡°impact flashes¡± from meteors pelting the darkened and heavily cratered lunar surface.
About two dozen ?scientists packed a conference room adjacent to mission control at NASA¡¯s Johnson Space Center in Houston to record the lunar phenomena witnessed by the Artemis crew in real time as ?their Orion ?spacecraft, about the size of an SUV, sailed around the moon roughly a quarter million miles (402,000 kilometers) from Earth.
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