NASA has said that the Orion spacecraft has successfully completed its lunar flyby, passing just 81 miles above the Moon's surface.
The space agency said Orion received the signal with NASA's Deep Space Network at 7:59 a.m. EST after successfully performing an outbound powered flyby burn at 7:44 a.m. EST.
At the time of the burn, Orion was 328 miles above the Moon: shortly after the burn, Orion passed 81 miles above the Moon, traveling at 5,102 mph.
This is the first of two maneuvers required to enter the farthest retrograde orbit around the Moon, and Orion will remain in this orbit for about a week to test spacecraft systems.
Over the weekend Orion had already reached the point in its journey where the main gravitational force is the Moon ahead of its first lunar flyby.
Space enthusiasts can see which antennas are communicating with Orion in real-time on Deep Space Network Now. They can also track Orion through the Artemis Real-Time Orbit website
Orion reached the Moon's sphere of influence at 1:09 pm CST and on Sunday night completed its fourth outbound trajectory correction burn ahead of the outbound flyby burn.
NASA said over the weekend that a team was looking at the Star Tracker system to understand several faults in the random access memory, which have been successfully corrected with power cycles.