Artemis II Flight Day 4: Koch and Hansen Complete Deep-Space Manual Piloting Tests

On Flight Day 4, Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen each took turns manually controlling the Orion spacecraft in a 41-minute deep-space piloting evaluation beginning at 9:09 p.m. EDT. The crew tested two distinct thruster modes — six degrees of freedom (full 3D maneuvering) and three degrees of freedom (attitude control only) — providing engineers with critical data on Orion's handling qualities in the deep-space environment far from Earth's gravitational influence. This followed Pilot Victor Glover's Day 2 manual piloting test. The data will inform future training procedures for Artemis III and beyond. At wakeup on April 4, the spacecraft was approximately 169,000 miles from Earth with the Moon just 110,700 miles away. The crew also received from mission control a preliminary list of 30 lunar surface targets to observe during the April 6 flyby, including the Orientale basin — a ~600-mile-wide impact crater straddling the Moon's near and far sides that formed approximately 3.8 billion years ago.