Desk Correspondent , Washington DC - The Artemis II crew is now roughly halfway on its 10 day journey to the Moon, with NASA and the astronauts themselves sharing spectacular new images of Earth taken from inside the Orion capsule. The four‑person mission commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian space agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and has since executed a successful trans‑lunar injection burn that sent Orion speeding out of Earth orbit and on a looping path around the Moon’s far side.

NASA has released the first high resolution photographs snapped by the crew, including a backlit view of Earth showing shimmering auroras and the zodiacal light at the limb, taken by Wiseman through Orion’s window shortly after the burn. Another frame highlights the terminator line separating day and night, underscoring how small and fragile our planet appears from deep space, mission officials have described the images as “breathtaking” and symbolic of the mission’s milestone, noting that the spacecraft is now over 100,000 miles from Earth and about 130-150,000 miles from the Moon. The crew has reported being “glued to the windows,” constantly photographing the planet and the cosmos as they approach the halfway point, with mission control calling the mid course trajectory “excellent” and scrapping an early correction burn because Orion’s systems are performing so well.

If all goes to plan, Artemis II will swing around the far side of the Moon on April 6, making this the first time humans have left low Earth orbit since 1972, before returning to Earth for a Pacific Ocean splashdown on April 10. The mission is uncrewed for the risky lunar landing phase, but every photograph and data point gathered by the Artemis II crew will feed directly into preparations for Artemis III, which aims to put astronauts including the first woman and first person of colour on the lunar surface later this decade.