As the Artemis II spacecraft hurtles back to Earth after its historic moon flight, the four-man crew has made a poignant request: naming two lunar craters to honor both their missions and a deeply personal loss. The moon mission marks a major step toward achieving a major milestone for human spaceflight. Commander Reid Wiseman and his crew have proposed naming a small, bright crater “Carroll” in honor of Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Wiseman, a neonatal nurse who died of cancer in 2020. A second crater would be named ‘Integrity’, after the crew’s Orion capsule.
The request was sent to Earth by Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on Monday, just as the crew broke Apollo 13’s record for the furthest distance humans have traveled in deep space. Wiseman, overcome with emotion, was unable to say a word during the announcement. Meanwhile, the gesture echoes a famous 1968 moment from Apollo 8, when astronaut Jim Lovell unofficially named “Mount Marilyn” after his wife.
While these names are currently tentative, the crew plans to submit them to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for official recognition upon return.
NASA lunar scientist Ryan Wakins noted that the moment left Mission Control in tears. “I think we’re just seeing a more human aspect of space travel,”
said Watkins, contrasting the emotional transparency of the Artemis crew with the purely business-like attitude of the 1960s Apollo era. The Artemis II mission is currently on its final leg home. After passing within 6,000 kilometers of the lunar surface, the crew of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christiana Koch and Jeremy Hansen will crash into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego on Friday, April 10, 2026.
“It was definitely a very emotional moment. I don’t think most of us knew it was coming,” NASA lunar scientist Ryan Watkins told The Associated Press on Wednesday from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There wasn’t a dry eye.”
The IAU’s Ramasamy Venupogal promised a decision on Carroll and Integrity within about a month, according to the “simple requests” standard.
Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon, famously etched his young daughter’s initials into the moon dust in 1972 — a reminder of the personal legacy astronauts leave behind.
