By Joey Roulette
ORLANDO, Florida, April 2 (Reuters) – NASA’s Artemis II astronauts on Thursday wrapped up their first day in space by testing cameras they will use to capture dramatic images of Earth as it slowly recedes beneath them, hours before leaving orbit for the moon.
“It’s like walking out back at your house, trying to take a picture of the moon. That’s what it feels like right now trying to take a picture of Earth,” Commander Reid Wiseman told mission control in Houston as he snapped photos of his home planet with an iPhone.
More than 40,000 miles (64,000 km) away from Earth, where the planet appears as a shrinking sunlit globe, Wiseman said taking photos from that distance made it difficult to adjust exposure settings on his GoPro and iPhone.
Mission Specialist Christina Koch described to mission control “the beauty that we’re seeing.”
“You can actually make out the coastline of the continent, you can make out rivers because of the sunglare, you can see high thunderclouds … and you can see the South Pole lit up. It’s just phenomenal,” she said.
The mission, however, has not been free of small technical glitches. There have been problems with its toilet and Wiseman’s initial attempts to use Microsoft Outlook to check emails, both of which were fixed.
ASTRONAUTS USE GOPROS AND IPHONES TO DOCUMENT TRIP
The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission, which launched from Florida at 6:35 p.m. ET (2235 GMT) on Wednesday, have a few different devices on board to take photos of space from inside their Orion capsule throughout the flight.
They include a small GoPro action camera, iPhones and professional Nikon cameras, a more familiar brand for NASA astronauts who have used them on the International Space Station (ISS) for years.
The decision to equip the crew with iPhones was made under NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, a billionaire astronaut who flew on two private SpaceX Dragon missions and used the devices during his own flights, NASA officials have said.
NASA has yet to release any images captured by the crew so far, but expects to do so later in the mission after more climactic moments. Among them is an anticipated “Earthrise” image, echoing the famous photo taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders in 1968 as his spacecraft looped around the moon.
On day six, the astronauts are expected to reach roughly 252,000 miles from Earth, the most distant point ever flown by humans, when the planet will appear no larger than a basketball beyond the moon’s shadowed far side.
The crew is now nearing an orbital exit ramp that will sling them out of Earth’s orbit and onto a trajectory toward the moon beginning at 7:49 p.m. ET (2349 GMT) on Thursday, a key phase of their journey called a trans-lunar injection involving a combination of the Orion service module’s thrusters and orbital mechanics.
During their first day in space, the astronauts completed the first of dozens of test objectives, including a proximity operations demonstration to evaluate Orion’s steering.
TOILET MALFUNCTION
Not long after the successful launch, Koch alerted mission control in Houston to a red blinking light signaling a problem with Orion’s toilet, housed in a small compartment within the crew cabin, itself only slightly larger than a minivan’s interior. Mission engineers implemented a fix after a proximity operations test, NASA said.
Spacecraft toilets are often awkward to use but are essential for long-duration missions, with designs varying widely.
On the ISS and Orion, astronauts use a $24 million Universal Waste Management System, which uses suction to collect waste, recycles urine into water and seals solid waste in bags that are eventually jettisoned.
The toilet includes a specially shaped funnel and hose for urine and a seat for bowel movements. The funnel and seat can be used simultaneously, reflecting feedback from female astronauts, NASA’s website shows.
By contrast, astronauts on the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s used rudimentary bags attached to their bodies, storing them in onboard compartments or leaving them on the moon.
Orion’s toilet more closely resembles a conventional design and is shielded from the rest of the cabin by a small door.
It’s “the one place we can go during the mission where we can actually feel like we’re alone for a moment,” Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency said in a video last year.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Joe Brock and Jamie Freed)
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