Moments after the crew of Artemis II broke the spaceflight record for the farthest humans have ever been from Earth, astronauts shared an emotional tribute, proposing to name a Moon crater after mission commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman, who died of cancer in 2020.
Emotional tribute in space
Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, speaking to Houston, became emotional as he described the crater’s location: “It’s on the nearside/farside boundary. In fact, it’s just on the nearside of that boundary, and at certain times of the Moon’s transit around Earth, we will be able to see this from Earth. Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie… We would like to call it Carroll.”
Following Hansen’s statement, 45 seconds of silence fell over Mission Control, with the crew hugging Wiseman on the NASA broadcast. CapCom Jenny Gibbons later confirmed: “Integrity and Carroll Crater. Loud and clear. Thank you.”
Integrity Crater also proposed
The crew also proposed naming a different crater in honour of their spacecraft, Integrity. Hansen described it as “relatively in the middle” of a line from Orientale to Ohm Crater. Like Carroll Crater, the name will require formal approval from the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which can take time. A similar case was Apollo 8’s “Mount Marilyn,” named in 1968 but only officially recognised in 2017.
Candidate location for Carroll Crater
While NASA has not yet confirmed the exact crater, lunar imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera suggests a candidate northwest of Glushko Crater, at the same latitude as Ohm Crater, appearing as a bright spot at roughly 18.8° N, 86.5° W. This feature does not yet appear in the 2013 1:1 million scale lunar maps maintained by the USGS and approved by the IAU.
Also read: Artemis II crew breaks distance record from Earth
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