Artemis II’s “Carroll Crater” Is the Hopecore We All Need Right Now
NASA’s Artemis II mission has been bringing people together in some surprising ways, as space geeks and just those slightly curious about the cosmos follow the crew’s updates. The venture is the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit in decades, as well as the furthest human expedition beyond the planet in history. It has been filled with no shortage of surprising and often beautiful moments (including the fact that a piece of the Wright Brothers’ plane is on board the craft), but the newest one has just taken things to a whole new level.
On Monday, as the Artemis II crew continued their record-breaking orbit, they called down to mission control to commemorate the occasion, as well as request that a few “relatively fresh craters on the moon” be renamed. In addition to naming a crater Integrity, after the capsule that the Artemis II crew have been traveling in, they requested that another crater be named Carroll. This dedication was even more personal, as it was in honor of Carroll Taylor Wiseman, the late wife of Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman.
Fellow Artemis II member Jeremy Hansen got choked up as he delivered the message to mission control. The emotional video of the naming, which was shared by NASA on Instagram, culminates in the four astronauts sharing a group hug.
“The second one, and especially meaningful for this crew, is a number of years ago, we started this journey and our close-knit astronaut family and we lost a loved one,” Hansen explains. “Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katey and Ellie. [The crater is] a bright spot on the moon and we would like to call it Carroll.”
Who Was Carroll Wiseman?
Carroll was a pediatric nurse practitioner and school nurse, who had been married to Reid since 2003. She passed away on May 17, 2020, at the age of 46, after a five-year battle with cancer. As Reid later revealed, Carroll insisted that her husband continue his astronaut training in Houston, even as her cancer was getting worse.
“When she really started getting sick, I wanted to move us back towards where her family was from,” he told CBS News. “And she’s like, ‘No, this is where you work. This is the job you love. This is where you work, and this is where our kids are growing up, and we are going to stay right here.’ To me, that was marching orders … to continue down this path.”
After Carroll’s passing, Reid became a single parent to their two daughters, Ellie and Katherine. The family’s preparation for the Artemis II mission, including selfies and homemade cookies, had already charmed social media as the expedition was beginning. But the naming of the Carroll crater has uniquely touched people, both in the context of how dire other things currently are in the world, and in the context of space and love and human existence itself. Honestly, I couldn’t even get through writing this article without starting to cry.
I, personally, found out the news from attorney, author, and content creator Reb Masel, who is already a bright spot on social media for her legal advice and dramatic readings of court transcripts. She shared an emotional video reacting to the Carroll crater naming, acknowledging that “being human is really all we have.”
As she also eloquently put it on Twitter: “Carroll, now a bright spot on our Moon, because four people, who traveled farther from Earth than any human in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth has ever been, loved someone so much, they carried her the whole way there.”
(featured image: JanetR3)
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