NASA’s Artemis II Moon Mission Daily Agenda

After about eight-and-a-half hours in space, the astronauts will sleep for a short period. The four astronauts will be awakened after about four hours to perform an additional engine firing that will put Orion into the correct orbital geometry for its translunar injection (TLI) burn on flight day 2. They'll also take the opportunity to perform a brief check out of their emergency communications on the Deep Space Network, at the most-distant point of their high Earth orbit, which is necessary before the TLI.

About eight minutes after Artemis II lifts off, the Orion spacecraft and its crew, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will be in space. The approximately 10-day test flight will be packed with activity as the astronauts venture around the Moon and back, with teams checking out Orion's systems along the way. While teams in mission control could refine the crew's schedule each day based on operational activities during the test flight, ground teams and the crew have a general plan for each day of the mission.

Once the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket's main engines cutoff, Orion and the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) separate from the rest of rocket. The ICPS still has work to do – about 49 minutes after launch, its engine will fire to raise the perigee, or lowest point of a spacecraft's orbit, to a safe altitude of 100 miles above Earth. About an hour later, when Orion reaches that perigee, the ICPS will fire again to continue raising the spacecraft into a high-Earth orbit.