Astronauts aboard Artemis II have captured stunning images of Earth as they travel toward the moon, marking humanity’s first crewed lunar mission in more than half a century.
The images, released by NASA, were taken about a day and a half into the mission and show Earth as a bright blue sphere surrounded by swirling white clouds, with a green aurora visible from space.
One of the photos was taken by mission commander Reid Wiseman, showing a curved slice of Earth through the window of the Orion spacecraft, while another image captured the entire globe as the spacecraft moved farther away from home.
Mission officials say the crew, three Americans and one Canadian, were more than 110,000 miles from Earth when the images were taken and are continuing their journey toward the moon, which they are expected to reach in the coming days.
The astronauts are travelling aboard the Orion capsule, which fired its main engine to push the crew out of Earth’s orbit and set them on a path toward the moon. The spacecraft will swing around the moon and then return directly to Earth without landing.
During the journey, the spacecraft was repositioned so that the entire Earth, including the northern lights, filled the crew’s window, a moment Wiseman described as breathtaking.
“It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks,” he said during a live interview from space.
The mission marks the first time astronauts have travelled toward the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, the last time humans visited the lunar region.
The Artemis programme is expected to pave the way for future missions that could return humans to the moon’s surface and eventually support missions to Mars, in what NASA describes as the next era of human space exploration.
As the astronauts continue their journey, the images of Earth serve as a reminder of how small and fragile the planet appears from space, and how historic the mission could be for the future of space travel.
