The astronauts on the Artemis II journey proposed naming a moon crater for the late wife of Reid Wiseman, the mission commander.
The four who flew beyond the moon this week — Mr. Wiseman, fellow Americans Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Jeremy Hansen — came up with the idea of two crater titles, NASA said.
The two names are not official yet. After the mission, they will be submitted to the International Astronomical Union, the governing organization for titles tagged to celestial bodies and features on their surfaces.
If the IAU approves, one of the craters will be named for Mr. Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Wiseman, who died from cancer at age 46 in 2020, while the other will go by Integrity, the mission’s Orion-model spacecraft, NASA said.
The crew is expected to splash down near San Diego at 5:07 p.m. local time Friday.
The mission has broken the record for the farthest distance traveled from Earth. The old record was set in 1970 by Apollo 13, which flew 248,655 miles into outer space. The Artemis II mission reached 252,756 miles before looping back around the moon, NASA said.
“From the cabin of Integrity here, as we surpass the furthest distance humans have ever traveled from planet Earth, we do so in honoring the extraordinary efforts and feats of our predecessors. … We most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,” Mr. Hansen said.
The mission also got within 4,067 miles of the moon’s surface, making the crew members the first people to see some portions of the far side of the moon with their own eyes, NASA said.
