As of April 6th, 2026, the Artemis II crew has elapsed 6 days into their mission. Since the launch, the crew has recorded what has happened during orbit.

On Saturday, April 4th, the crew was preparing to enter deep space. When a ship enters deep space, everything has to be adjusted for the crew. So at the beginning of Saturday, the crew members had to manually set up everything.

To learn more about deep space Artemis II, “Includes several payloads and activities designed to help NASA understand how spacecraft systems, the crew, and biological samples respond to the deep space environment.”

In addition to learning about deep space, the crew has to prepare for Lunar Orbit. This is what happened during the other half of Saturday. “Glover (one of the crew members) will take manual control of the spacecraft to test its performance in deep space to provide more data about the spacecraft’s handling qualities across different movements.” The 4-man team gets ready to photograph the far side of the moon and send these pictures back to NASA, which is scheduled for Monday, April 6th.

On Sunday, April 5th, “The Artemis II crew in Orion completed a manual piloting demonstration and reviewed the lunar flyby plan to wrap up their third day in space.” Most of Sunday was spent testing the spacecraft’s manual performance and running checks on all the main parts to ensure their safety through deep space. Finally, the team reviewed the checklist NASA sent them to ensure all the images needed of the moon would be obtained. Their long-awaited return is scheduled for April 10th, around 5:00 p.m. PT.