The best photos from NASA's first moon mission in more than 50 years

 NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight around the moon in more than 50 years, has been a feast for the eyes.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen concluded their 10-day mission Friday evening with a splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean.

The crew launched April 1 on the 10-day journey, which took them around the far side of the moon. They traveled farther from Earth than any humans had before, breaking the distance record set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970.

Their photos from the lunar flyby on Monday — when they saw parts of the moon that no humans had ever viewed with their own eyes — have captivated public attention.

NASA plans to release many more images from the mission now that the crew can hand over its data, rather than beaming it back from space. But for now, here are some of the best photos from Artemis II.

The mission launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Artemis II crew were the first people that NASA’s Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket had ever carried into space.

Artemis II was one of the most highly anticipated space events in recent years, since it was the first time people have launched toward the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The launch was delayed several times earlier this year for rocket repairs, but when the day finally arrived, local officials in central Florida’s “Space Coast” estimated that hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the area to watch Artemis II lift off.

Although Wiseman, Koch, Glover and Hansen did not land on the lunar surface, their mission was designed to test the rocket and capsule ahead of a planned moon landing in 2028. After that, NASA hopes to build a base on the moon and establish a long-term presence there.

On the second day of the flight, the Orion capsule performed a key engine burn to put it on a path toward the moon. The maneuver, known as a translunar injection burn, boosted the spacecraft’s velocity enough to send it out of Earth orbit.

The astronauts then spent three days journeying to the moon. Early on Monday, their Orion capsule entered a region of space known as the lunar sphere of influence, where the moon’s gravitational pull is stronger than Earth’s

The most anticipated moment of the mission came on Monday, when the crew spent seven hours taking close-up photos of the lunar surface and observing specific sites on the moon, including impact craters, ridges and vast volcanic plains.

During their flyby around the moon’s far side, the astronauts reached a distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, which was more than 4,100 miles farther than the Apollo 13 record.

One of the first photos from the flyby released publicly showed the Artemis II crew’s view of “Earthset,” as Earth disappeared out of view behind the moon.

The photo was a nod to the iconic “Earthrise” image taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, when astronauts Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell circumnavigated the moon. That archival image, however, captured Earth re-emerging beyond the edge of the moon, rather than dipping below it.

Other photos showed surprisingly rugged topography along the moon’s terminator, the dividing line between its illuminated side and the side cloaked in darkness.

“There’s just so much magic in the terminator — the islands of light, the valleys that look like black holes,” Glover radioed to Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “You’d fall straight to the center of the moon if you stepped in some of those. It’s just so visually captivating.”

The astronauts focused some of their observations on Orientale basin, a nearly 600-mile-wide crater that straddles the moon’s near and far sides. The 3.8 billion-year-old basin was formed when a large object smacked into the moon’s surface.

The crew’s high-resolution photos of features in and around the moon’s impact craters could help scientists understand how the moon formed and how its topography changed over time.