The Artemis II crew lifted off at 6:35 p.m. ET on Wednesday, April 1.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports three asteroids will safely pass Earth on April 7, 2026. Asteroids such as 2011 FT9, 2024 TB7 and 2002 TB70 will miss by wide margins. NASA tracks such flybys to refine orbital predictions and bolster planetary defense.

The Artemis II crew got the green light to bring iPhone 17s aboard the spacecraft months ago and had them in hand during their pre-flight quarantine. Smartphones have left Earth's orbit before, including on the 2021 Inspiration4 SpaceX flight and the last mission of the American Space Shuttle program.

Our breakdown of 7 hidden science lessons in the stunning photo taken by an astronaut on the Artemis II mission.

N o mission to the Moon would be complete without its own conspiracy theories. You can spend billions of dollars sending humans hundreds of thousands of miles across space and take all the photos and make all the scientific observations you like, but a small community of people will still cry "FAKE!"

The findings were published March 20 in the journal AGU Advances and were based on data recorded by Juno in 2021 and 2022, after NASA granted an extension to the spacecraft’s operations upon completing a five-year science campaign at Jupiter.

As the four Artemis astronauts approached a high point of their lunar mission -- getting slung around the far side of the Moon -- NASA staffers crowded into Houston's famed