It was the Easter weekend and the Orion Spaceship performed an escape burn to slingshot itself towards the moon. It crossed the Lagrange point and entered the moons hillsphere ( an area around the moon where the moon's gravity pulls more than the Earth's).
The four astronauts on the spaceship are going to pass around the far side of the moon and then return to Earth. At the time of writing this post, they were very close to the moon, just some hours away from a flyby. They won't land on this mission, it's just to test out the new hardware and make sure they can reach the moon safely. The last thing I saw on the live feed was the crew asking flight control if they could tilt the spaceship to get a better view of the moon's surface.
We are going to see a close up shot of the moon with modern cameras, that will be interesting. I was wondering if they're getting flashing in their eyes from deep space radiation? Have they found a way to deal with deep space radiation yet? I don't know.
Interesting times.
