Artemis II crew healthy, spacecraft performing well, NASA reports

The Orion capsule carrying four astronauts in NASA's Artemis II mission executed a key thruster firing on Thursday (April 2) that will kick the crew out of Earth's orbit and on a path toward the moon, committing them to reaching the farthest distance humans have ever travelled in space.

The successful manoeuvre put the crew on a path to enter the moon's sphere of gravitational influence by Sunday morning, as they prepare to beat the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970.

In a briefing Thursday, Lori Glaze, NASA's Artemis Program Lead, said "our crew is healthy, and our spacecraft is performing exceptionally well."

Despite minor challenges, including a brief communication outage and routine technical adjustments that included Microsoft Outlook issues for one of the astronauts, the mission continues smoothly.

They had been in a highly elliptical Earth orbit swinging them as far as 43,000 miles (64,000 km) away on one end and about 100 miles close on the other, from where the key thruster firing to the moon began, known as the translunar injection burn.

The manoeuvre, which began at 7:49 p.m. ET (2349 GMT), is an orbital exit ramp slinging them out of Earth's orbit and onto a figure-eight-shaped trajectory toward the moon. It's the final major thruster firing of the mission, leaving the Orion capsule largely under the influence of orbital mechanics for the remainder of the mission.

-Production: Eva Weininger, Gerardo Gomez/Reuters