The crew of the Artemis II mission had to tidy up their tears quickly, lest they be bouncing all over their spacecraft.
Because there wasn’t a dry eye in the Integrity as they named a crater that straddles the near and far side of the moon after mission commander Reid Wiseman‘s late wife Carroll Wiseman, who died in 2020.
“A number of years ago we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family, and we lost a loved one,” mission specialist Jeremy Hansen told mission control on the evening of April 6 after they had traveled further away from Earth than any other humans in history. “Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie.”
While they dubbed another crater Integrity, after their ship, “If you want to find this one,” Hansen continued, “you look at Glushko [crater], and it’s just to the northwest of that, at the same latitude as Ohm [crater].”
“It’s a bright spot on the moon,” he added, “and we would like to call it Carroll.”
With that, Wiseman, Hansen, mission specialist Christina Koch and pilot Victor Glover floated in for a group hug.
