strikes as they progress in the next couple of weeks. but now i want to talk about something more cheerful. last week we spoke to howard hugh of nasa, one of the scientists working on the artemis mission to get people back to the moon. not that we are obsessed with it in the studio. but the mission is up there somewhere, and it has been capturing some amazing pictures. look at this, the artemis mission s orion capsule has successfully done a flyby of the moon. look at the detail on the surface, at lot more than a block of cheese. it is day 11 of the mission now, and orion is in what is called distant retrograde orbit. i learned that this morning. it means flying at about 40,000 miles above the moon, and it will go halfway around before coming home, when it is due to splashdown in the atlantic on the 11th of december. as howard told us, they need to capsule back for the next mission. the pictures are amazing, but the project is a giant chemistry lab too. there are no
be stable? maybe we ll capture asteroids and park them. these pictures are kind of part of this process of getting a human presence in deep space for the first time. yeah. i ve read those words, distant retrograde orbit. i thought, sounds impressive. i have no idea what it means. i m glad you just explained it for us, why this is important. we re also seeing these selfies that the capsule cameras are taking. they re cool. what s the practical use for these? well, this is a whole new spaceship, right? it s like when you buy your first car. you want to take a lot of pictures of it because it looks cool, but also everyone working on the car. part of the reason is to actually make sure all these zillion pieces of technology really advanced technology, that it s all working because, you know, eventually we ll have human being on these spacecraft and have human beings going back and forth all the time. what we re seeing here is the
habitation this close, and really the important thing about these pictures is they speak to the fact that we re what s going to happen is we re about to go into this new orbit, you know, this special orbit that nasa is going to try out and no one s ever done that before. no one s ever tried to explore this part of sort of the space, you know, transit system. humanity is raight now at this stage where we re trying to flesh out just like it took us awhile to try to build bridges and highway overpasses, nasa is circling around the moon, taking those pictures and now he s getting those distant, retrograde orbit, and it s something that s never been tried before, and it s essential to have human deep space capacity. it look forever to build the skyway in jersey which is aening lo, elevated highway, the same thing is going on with nasa. they re about to try a new part of space to see how will it
for about ten been working on developing this now for about ten years, been working on developing this now for about ten years, so been working on developing this now for about ten years, so to been working on developing this now for about ten years, so to finally- for about ten years, so to finally launch for about ten years, so to finally launch it. for about ten years, so to finally launch it. to for about ten years, so to finally launch it, to finally for about ten years, so to finally launch it, to finally send - for about ten years, so to finally launch it, to finally send it - for about ten years, so to finally launch it, to finally send it on i for about ten years, so to finallyj launch it, to finally send it on its journey launch it, to finally send it on its journey to launch it, to finally send it on its journey to the launch it, to finally send it on its journey to the moon launch it, to finally send it on its journey to the moon and - launch it, to fi
yeah, so it s going to come within 81 ooh miles of the surface of the moon. we ll get some beautiful images of that. and then it s going to do a burn and put itself into what s called a distant retrograde orbit which utilizes what are points to create some stability for, basically, long endurance kind of orbit, a long endurns orbit around the moon. but eventually, on december 1st, it s going to burn again to come home, and on december 11th it will reenter the atmosphere and land in the pacific ocean. this mission is uncrewed, the next mission will, in fact, have astronauts onboard, but we re testing everything we can right now to make sure that our astronauts are safe on the next mission. griff: artemis is not the only impressive thing, you ve got the telescope that has some pretty amazing images. it seems to have spotted the most distant galaxies, and they are far brighter than anyone