Artemis II team names moon crater after crew member’s late wife Carroll

Members of the Artemis II crew on Monday requested that a previously unnamed crater on the moon be named "Carroll" in honor of mission commander Reid Wiseman’s wife who died in 2020 at the age of 46 from cancer. 

Calling down to mission control, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen said that they had found two new craters on the Moon that had not been named, "and our crew would like to propose a couple of potential names for those items." The call to mission control came as the team was approaching the Moon for its historic flyby. 

Hansen said that the name "Carroll" was "especially meaningful for this crew," noting that "a number of years ago, we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family, and we lost a loved one." He said that the crater sits near the boundary between the near and far sides of the Moon, described as a "bright spot" that sits on the same latitude as the crater Ohm, and northwest of the crater Glushko. 

"We lost a loved one. Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie," he said. The team was seen embracing following the message down to mission control. The team also proposed naming a crater after their Orion spacecraft, which is named Integrity. 

Carroll Wiseman was a registered nurse who worked in a newborn intensive care unit. In his NASA bio, Reid Wiseman said that he considered his time spent as a single parent to be the "greatest challenge and the most rewarding phase of his life," despite being a Navy veteran, pilot, and astronaut. 

Speaking with NASA’s Curious Universe podcast in January, Wiseman said that it had been "hard" for him to go home and tell his kids that he had been selected for the spaceflight. He said that in response, his eldest daughter, Ellie, had made Moon cupcakes for the family. "And she was the one that was, I think, most against this for her life. And so I just—I thought that was amazing. Like here these two kids I thought were gonna pull me, but they were pushing me, and I that was, I will never forget that like that is exactly the way you want to feel as a parent. It was such a cool moment for me," he said.

Artemis II completed its flyby of the Moon on Monday evening, and the spacecraft is beginning its travel back to Earth. The spacecraft is scheduled to leave the lunar sphere of influence at 1:23 pm, and Orion’s thrusters are planned to ignite for the first of three trajectory correction burns at 9:03 pm. The crew will begin to have staggered off-duty periods on Tuesday to rest up before beginning tasks for the return to the Earth’s surface.