'He gave her the Moon': Artemis 2 crew names crater after commander's late wife
All names are subject to approval by the International Astronomical Union.
A moment captured during NASA’s Artemis 2 mission in space is warming hearts here on Earth.
Three NASA astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, have just been on a historic lunar fly-by.
Although they didn’t land on the moon, on April 6 at 1:57 p.m. ET, the four crew members made history by flying further into space than any other humans: a staggering 406,171 km from Earth, surpassing the record set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970.
Moments after breaking the distance record, they shared an emotional moment, proposing they name one of the two newly-discovered craters that were found in a “bright spot on the Moon” after Commander Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died in 2020 at the age of 46.
Caroll and Reid have two daughters, Katie, 17, and Ellie, 20.
The astronauts proposed naming the other crater Integrity, after their capsule.
Base image: NASA. Graphic compiled by Scott Sutherland for The Weather Network.
All names are subject to approval by the International Astronomical Union, and it can take years for a name to become official.
Social media lit up with praise for the Carroll crater — as some people wrote, in the end, Wiseman had given his wife the Moon.
The crew then continued its journey, reaching was a distance of around 406,771 km from Earth.
With files from April Walker. Header base image: NASA