Artemis II Astronauts Document Lunar Impact Flashes During Flyby

Phys.org Space reported that crew members aboard the Artemis II Orion spacecraft observed five extremely faint pinprick bursts of light on the lunar surface. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, noted the locations of these impact flashes on a digital image tablet on April 6, 2026. [1]

The crew observed these flashes from aboard the Orion spacecraft while positioned 46,000 miles, or 74,000 kilometers, away from the Moon. The handwritten annotations were marked in color-coded notes, with Wiseman using blue, Glover using green, and Hansen using red to record the locations of the lunar events. [1]

Artemis II was a crewed lunar flyby and the first crewed flight of the NASA-led Artemis program. It marked the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972, utilizing the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft, which was named Integrity by its four-person crew. [2]

The ten-day mission flew on a free-return trajectory around the Moon from April 1 to April 10, 2026. The four-person crew included NASA Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen. [3]