• Astronauts take photographs to document trip.
• Crew sees far side of Moon from new vantage.
• Mission could take humans farther than ever before.

HOUSTON: The Artemis astronauts were gearing up Saturday for their long-anticipated lunar flyby, including reviewing the surface features they must analyse and photograph during their time circling the Moon.

Upon waking around 1635 GMT on Saturday, the astronauts were approximately 169,000 miles (271,979 kilometres) from Earth, and approaching the Moon at 110,700 miles (178,154 kilometres), according to Nasa.

The next major milestone of the approximately 10-day journey is expected overnight Sunday into Monday, at which point the astronauts will enter the “lunar sphere of influence” — when the Moon’s gravity will have stronger pull on the spacecraft than Earth’s.

If all proceeds smoothly, as Orion whips around the Moon the astronauts could set a record by venturing farther from Earth than any human before.

The astronauts kicked off their day with a meal that included scrambled eggs and coffee, Nasa said, and had woken up to the tune of Chappell Roan’s pop smash “Pink Pony Club.”

“Morale is high on board,” commander Reid Wiseman told Houston’s Mission Control Centre as the space crew’s work day began.

The father of two girls was in high spirits in part because he had the chance to speak with his daughters from space.

“We’re up here, we’re so far away, and for a moment, I was reunited with my little family,” he told a live press conference. “It was just the greatest moment of my entire life.”

Wiseman along with fellow Americans Christina Koch and Victor Glover as well as Canadian Jeremy Hansen are on a historic journey around the Moon, which they’re soon due to slingshot around.

It’s a feat Wiseman has dubbed “Herculean” and which humanity has not accomplished in more than half-a-century.

Later on Saturday, Glover was due to perform a manual piloting demonstration to provide Nasa with more data regarding the spacecraft’s performance in deep space.

After that, the crew was planning to go over their checklist for documenting their experience travelling around the Moon.

The astronauts have had geology training in order to be able to photograph and describe lunar features, including ancient lava flows and impact craters.

They’ll see the Moon from a unique vantage point compared with the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s.

Apollo flights flew some 70 miles above the lunar surface, but the Artemis 2 crew will be just over 4,000 miles at their closest approach, which will allow them to see the complete, circular surface of the Moon, including regions near both poles.

Never before seen

But the Artemis 2 astronauts have already seen brand-new perspectives.

“Last night, we did have our first view of the moon far side, and it was just absolutely spectacular,” Koch, the mission specialist, said during a live interview from space.

John Honeycutt, manager of Nasa’s SLS (Space Launch System) program, shared at a briefing Saturday a new image transmitted by the astronauts.

“On the far left, you can see features of the Moon that have never been seen by human eyes until yesterday,” Honeycutt said, explaining that only robotic imagers had previously “seen” that region.

The Artemis 2 crew has been busy taking photographs including with smartphones, devices Nasa recently approved to take aboard spaceflights.

The space agency had previously released images from Orion that included a full portrait of Earth, featuring its deep blue oceans and billowing clouds.

But the space toilet has remained a chronic problem, and the astronauts have on occasion been directed to use their back-up urinal bags.

An attempted wastewater dump to funnel urine into space failed, Nasa said, likely due to a blockage because of ice. Troubleshooting of the problem is ongoing.

The Artemis 2 mission is part of a longer-term plan to repeatedly return to the Moon, with the goal of establishing a permanent lunar base that will offer a platform for further exploration.

It’s a highly anticipated journey that demands exacting precision — but there’s still room for the astronauts to live out their childhood dreams of spaceflight.

“It just makes me feel like a little kid,” said Hansen recently, describing the joy of floating.

Princess Beatrice, who is considered to be the “sensitive” one in the family, had been swarmed by rumours about her marriage and what the future looks like for her royal position.

The slew of events that have taken place since the release of the Epstein files have left her fraught with worry, which has led her to make a crucial decision about what she wants to do next.

It was revealed that Beatrice and her sister Princess Eugenie would have “alternative plans” for Easter Sunday as the royals gather at St. George’s Chapel. While it is understood that the decision was made on the insistence of King Charles, a royal author believes that choice was Beatrice’s.

“Whether or not Beatrice will want to be seen in public is debatable,” royal insider Ingrid Seward told The Sun.

“I suspect she will as she has her business and her husband’s business to think about and needs a glimmer of royal largesse to help it along after the scandal.”

Seward claimed that Beatrice was “always close” to her father Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and witnessing his “epic downfall” has “destroyed” her. Moreover, she also worries about her mother Sarah Ferguson, who “always confided in her”.

While Beatrice attended the Easter service last year with both her parents, this year she will be with her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, and their two young daughters. There is also strain on her five-year marriage with Edo as hurtful rumours continue.

“At least she has her children to distract her from the current reality of her life,” Seward said. “But she cannot avoid the media reports, and she will be mortified by the public’s reaction to her and her sister.”

Hence, she may have chosen to focus on her young family as the furore does not seem to be ending any time soon.

A Pentagon AI programme called Project Maven is at the centre of the US strikes against Iran and potentially one of the most consequential transformations of modern warfare.

What is it?

Project Maven is the Pentagon’s flagship artificial intelligence program, launched in 2017 as a narrow experiment to help military analysts make sense of the torrent of drone footage pouring in from conflict zones.

Operators were drowning in imagery, searching frame by frame for objects of interest that might appear for only a moment before vanishing. Maven was built to find the needle in the haystack.

Eight years later, the program has evolved into something far more expansive: an AI-assisted targeting and battlefield management system that has vastly accelerated what is known in war-making as the kill chain — the process from initial detection to destruction.

How does it work?

Maven functions like both the air traffic control of battle and its cockpit.

Aalok Mehta, director of the CSIS Wadhwani AI Center, described the system as “essentially an overlay” that fuses sensor data, enemy troop intelligence, satellite imagery, and information on troop deployment.

In practice, that means rapidly scanning satellite feeds to detect troop movements or identify targets, while also “taking a snapshot of the operational theater” to determine the best course of action for striking a specific target.

In a recent demonstration posted online, a Pentagon official described how Maven “magically” turns an observed threat into a targeting workflow, weighing available assets and presenting a commander with options.

The emergence of ChatGPT was another leap forward, broadening the use of the technology to a far greater range of users who can interact with Maven in natural language.

For now, this capability is supplied by Anthropic’s Claude — though that arrangement is coming to a bitter end after the Pentagon bristled at the AI lab’s demand that its model not be used for fully automated strikes or the tracking of US citizens.

Why did Google say no?

The ethical question was a factor in Maven’s early years, when Google was the program’s original AI contractor.

In 2018, more than 3,000 employees signed an open letter protesting the company’s involvement, arguing that the contract crossed a line. Several engineers resigned.

Google declined to renew when the contract expired, and subsequently published AI principles explicitly ruling out participation in weapons systems.

The episode exposed a fault line in Silicon Valley between engineers who viewed autonomous targeting as an ethical red line and defense officials who saw it as essential.

More recently, Google removed its AI policy restrictions and said it is leaning further into national security work. The Pentagon has said that Google, along with xAI and OpenAI, are in the mix to replace Claude in Maven.

What is Palantir’s role?

In 2024, Palantir — founded in part with CIA seed funding and built from the start around government intelligence work — stepped into the space Google vacated.

The company has reportedly become Maven’s primary technology contractor, and its AI now forms the operational backbone of the program.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp frames the stakes explicitly.

“This is a have, have-not world,” he said at a recent Palantir event, arguing that it was important for the West to achieve capabilities the rest of the world lacked.

A system that compresses a kill chain from hours to seconds makes an adversary obsolete, he said.

How has it fared?

The Pentagon and Palantir declined to comment on Maven’s performance in the current war with Iran.

US strikes have been carried out at a sustained pace, and it can be assumed that Maven’s ability to speed up the targeting and firing process has played a central role.

According to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, after three weeks, the US strike campaign settled into a pace of between 300 and 500 targets per day.

In the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, US forces struck over 1,000 targets, including a school housed in a building previously used as a military complex, according to various media reports. Iran has said the attack killed 168 children aged seven to 12 and wounded many other people.