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The crew of NASA\u2019s Artemis II mission spent Monday looking at parts of the moon that had never been seen by the human eye \u2014 and they paused briefly to pay a one-of-a-kind tribute to a lost family member.<\/p>\n
The crew shared video on Instagram as they discussed the new features and craters they\u2019d observed while seeing the far side of the moon for the first time, and shared the names they\u2019d chosen for two of them: Integrity, for their spacecraft; and Carroll, for mission Commander Reid Wiseman\u2019s late wife who died of cancer in 2020 at just 46 years old.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cOur science team helped us out with a couple of relatively fresh craters on the moon that have not been previously named, and our crew would like to propose a couple of potential names for those items or those areas,\u201d Canadian astronaut and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen explained. \u201cWe spent a bit of time this morning looking out the window and we\u2019re able to see them now, both with our naked eye and through the long lens, and so we feel this is a good time to send this down, and a special shout out to Kelsey for helping us with this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hansen said that the first of the two features was a crater that the crew wanted named \u201cin honor of our great spacecraft Integrity,\u201d but the second was one that held far deeper meaning for the members of the Artemis II crew.<\/p>\n
\u201cA number of years ago, we started this journey [with] our close-knit astronaut family and we lost a loved one, and there\u2019s a feature and a really neat place on the moon and it is on the near side\/far side boundary, in fact it\u2019s just on the near side of that boundary, and so at certain times of the moon\u2019s transit around earth you can \u2014 we will be able to see this from earth. And so we lost a loved one, her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katey and Ellie,\u201d Hansen said, his voice breaking. Wiseman could be seen in the video wiping away tears, as could mission specialist Christina Koch.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if you want to find this one, you look at Glushko and it\u2019s just to the northwest of that at the same latitude as Ohm and it\u2019s a bright spot on the moon. We would like to call it Carroll,\u201d he continued, his voice still shaky as he spelled out the name.<\/p>\n
The microphone cut then, and the three other astronauts quickly converged on Hansen, enveloping each other in a zero-gravity group hug.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n