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View of the Moon from the Orion capsule as the crew set the record for the farthest distance humans have travelled from Earth.Credit: NASA

Updated 6 April 2026, 4.33 p.m. CDT (Houston time)

Nature correspondent Alexandra Witze is with the mission scientists today at Johnson Space Center in Houston. She asked them how they’re feeling and what they’re most excited for the astronauts to observe on the Moon. Check out this video, put together from Alex’s interviews. We’re gonna be crying a lot over here too, scientists.

Updated 6 April 2026, 4.19 p.m. CDT (Houston time)

Reader question: The astronauts are seeing parts of the Moon that the human eye hasn’t seen before. Why?

We’ve put together a graphic to answer this one. Apollo astronauts travelled closer to the lunar surface than the Artemis II astronauts are. This means that the Apollo crews saw only small swathes of the lunar surface. They also saw the far side in darkness because their mission trajectory was designed to land astronauts on the near side during daylight.

So the Artemis II astronauts are indeed seeing parts of the far side, illuminated, for the first time in human history. Approximately 21% of the far side’s disk (including the Orientale impact basin) is in sunlight during today’s fly-by. The rest of the Moon that they are seeing illuminated today is its much more familiar near side.

Image credit: NASA

Updated 6 April 2026, 4.03 p.m. CDT (Houston time)

The astronauts have been switching spots at the capsule windows. Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen were the first to do observations and take photos. Then it was Christina Koch and Victor Glover’s turn. Now, they’re about to switch back.

The astronauts have three cameras on board: two Nikon D5 DSLRs, which are the workhorses of spaceflight photography, and one Nikon Z9, a newer mirrorless camera that was added at nearly the last moment. These automatically take three exposures for every press of the button. The first is an exposure that the Artemis II team members think is correct for the lighting conditions in that moment, the second is one that they think will be underexposed and the third is one that they think will be overexposed — to be sure one of the images will turn out well.

They are using a 400-millimetre lens to get as much detail as possible of the lunar disk. The astronauts observe the Moon in pairs, one photographing the surface while the other observes with the naked eye. They have trained to recognize basic geological features of the Moon, including the massive Orientale impact basin that is a major focus of today’s studies because it has never been observed fully by the human eye before. — Alexandra Witze

Updated 6 April 2026, 3.18 p.m. CDT (Houston time)

Reader question: Do the astronauts have science in their backgrounds?

Some of them do, yes. Mission specialist Christina Koch is an engineer who worked at scientific field stations in Greenland and Antarctica. Mission specialist Jeremy Hansen has a master’s degree in physics and worked at the underwater Aquarius laboratory off the coast of Florida, which is meant to emulate deep-space flight. (Incidentally, although this is Hansen’s first flight to space, Koch holds a number of spaceflight records.)

Reid Wiseman, the commander, set a record for science in orbit when he and a colleague performed 82 hours of research on the International Space Station during a single week in 2014.

The fourth astronaut, pilot Victor Glover, is a Navy aviator and test pilot. — Alexandra Witze

The Artemis II crew during a training session at Johnson Space Center in Houston.Credit: NASA/James Blair

Updated 6 April 2026, 2.51 p.m. CDT (Houston time)

The Artemis II lunar science team is getting what they were hoping for. On board the Orion capsule, the astronauts have observed craters at the north and south poles. Colour differences continue to be a theme: “The more I look at the Moon, the browner and browner it looks,” one of the astronauts said.

Astronaut and pilot Victor Glover is describing some challenges in looking from his dim laptop to the bright Moon and back down again, all while juggling logistics to capture the grandeur of the moment. — Alexandra Witze

Updated 6 April 2026, 2.34 p.m. CDT (Houston time)

I’ve been fortunate enough to gain access to the ‘science evaluation room’, a brand-new workspace in the main mission control building at Johnson Space Center in Houston. This is the kind of thing that sounds really bureaucratic, but in the extremely hierarchical world of NASA human spaceflight, it’s a big deal for science to have its own space. There’s a cluster of science specialists working together here to feed information and research to a top ‘science officer’ — planetary scientist Kelsey Young — who has a seat in the primary mission control room. (They don’t let reporters in that room generally.)

The mood here is quiet, tense and full of a

Moon fly-by live coverage: Artemis crew see intriguing colours on lunar surface