# No Course Correction Needed: Artemis II Day 3 Update + Comet MAPS Perihelion Report

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/no-course-correction-needed-artemis-ii-day-3-update-comet-maps-perihelion-report.md
Podcast: [Astronomy Daily: Space News Updates](https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676)
Published: 2026-04-04T11:32:43+00:00
Episode link: http://astronomydaily.io
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/mgln.ai/track/op3.dev/e/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/71098301/no_course_correction_needed_artemis_ii_day_3_update_comet_maps_perihelion_report.mp3
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Duration seconds: 1032

## Resource

Artemis II, Comet MAPS, and Mercury: Your Space Week Just Got Very Busy It's Day 3 of the Artemis II mission, a sungrazer comet is emerging from the solar corona, an Atlas V just set a payload record, and Mercury is at its best of the year. Here's everything you need to know from today's episode of Astronomy Daily. Artemis II Flight Day 3: Orion Doesn't Even Need a Course Correction Four humans are on their way to the Moon, and everything is going better than planned. Flight controllers cancelled the first of three scheduled trajectory correction burns today — Orion is already on such a precise path that the burn simply wasn't needed. As Howard Hu, NASA's Orion program manager, noted, this reflects exceptional navigation performance throughout the mission. The crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen — spent Day 3 on medical readiness drills, practising CPR in weightlessness and checking out the spacecraft's medical equipment. They also successfully tested Orion's optical communications system, transmitting HD video back to Earth from deep space. On Monday, April 6th, Orion will swing around the lunar far side at its closest approach — briefly out of radio contact with Earth — and at the mission's farthest point will travel 252,757 miles from home. That breaks the human spaceflight distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. Fifty-six years. We're finally going further. Comet MAPS: The Solar Plunge Is Done — Now Comes the Wait At 14:22 UTC on April 4th, Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) reached perihelion — passing just 161,000 kilometres from the surface of the Sun, skimming through the lower solar corona. Whether it survived that encounter is still being determined from spacecraft imagery, as the comet…

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