Artemis II tracker: How long will it take for the astronauts to get to the moon? 

The four astronauts aboard Artemis II woke up to a sight very few people have ever seen – the entire Earth.

A towering rocket took off on Wednesday, which will carry Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen to the moon and back.

Well, it carried them some of the way. The Orion, a minivan-sized deep-space capsule atop the rocket, separated from the spacecraft yesterday.

Its engine fired for about six seconds to pull off a manoeuvre known as a trans-lunar injection, flinging the Orion out of Earth’s orbit and to the moon.

Now the crew’s lunar cruise will begin.

Where is Artemis II now?

To find out, you can use a special tracker website Nasa built, which is also available on the space agency’s mobile phone app.

The tracker, called the Artemis Real-time Orbit Website (AROW), shows the Orion travelling at about 5,000 miles an hour.

It shows the crew are more than 81,000 miles away at the time of writing, with 174,000 miles to go before they reach the moon.

The Nasa app lets users hold their phone up and see where Orion is relative to Earth.

As it passes behind the moon, Artemis will set a record for the farthest that any humans have travelled from Earth: 252,799 miles.

The crew will also be able to see the far side of our lunar neighbour, the hemisphere that is always turned away from us. 

‘I can’t wait to see the pictures from the far side,’ Dr Alfredo Carpineti, an astrophysicist and author of Invisible Rainbows, tells Metro.

‘The Artemis II will see areas that no human has ever seen directly before.’

We don’t know all that much about our only natural satellite, such as how it formed, scientists previously told Metro.

One reason is that the moon is tidally locked to the Earth, rotating while it circles the Earth, so the same side is always facing the planet.

This side, sometimes called the ‘dark side’, isn’t pockmarked by craters from asteroids like the other, so it is a treasure trove for how the early solar system may have been like.

Artemis II will see the moon on April 6, with the lunar flyby lasting about two days, according to Nasa’s itinerary for the astronauts.

Out of the capsule’s window, the moon will ‘look to them about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length’.

‘They will devote the majority of their day to taking photos and videos of the moon,’ Nasa says of April 7, with a call set up with Nasa Earthlings the next day.

By this point, the spacecraft will be on what is known as a ‘free return’ trajectory, with the moon’s gravity swinging the capsule back to Earth.

That means the Orion could return to Earth even if the propulsion system failed.

Nasa knows where the Orion is because the craft is constantly sending data to the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston. 

If all goes to plan, the Orion will splash down in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of San Diego.

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