Artemis II astronauts broke Apollo 13’s distance record at 1.57pm eastern time on Monday, hugging each other in the cramped capsule as they made history for being the first four humans to travel the farthest from Earth than anyone before them.

Before hitting the record, the quartet dimmed the lights in their capsule and positioned themselves by the windows in preparation to set the long-distance record as they fly by the moon without stopping – with plans to ultimately swing around for planet Earth.

“It is blowing my mind what you can see with the naked eye from the moon right now,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen radioed ahead of the flyby. “It is just unbelievable.”

He challenged “this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived”.

The astronauts – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of the US space agency Nasa; and Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency – will become Earth’s farthest travelled, going 5,000 miles (8,000km) beyond the moon, exceeding the distance record set by the ill-fated Apollo 13 in 1970.

They were under instruction to make observations of the Earth’s only moon to make annotations and audio recordings and situation reports on “how the crew is positioned, any missed targets, anything unexpected they saw, lunar target descriptions, and their emotions and reactions as they fly-by the moon”.

The astronauts are directed to look out for unviewed lunar features often called highlands, marshes, bays, seas and lakes on the moon – though of course none exist in the sense they do on Earth – they are basalt lunar crater features named by 16th century astronomers, including Galileo and Johannes Kepler, as descriptive titles for what they observed.

Astronauts on the emergency flyby in 1970 – commander Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert – reached a maximum 248,655 miles from Earth before making their turn. Artemis’s crew should exceed Apollo 13’s mission by about 4,000 miles.

On what is the sixth day of a lunar mission that has reinvigorated Nasa’s space exploration program, the Orion capsule’s roughly six-hour flyby on Monday promises views of the moon’s far side that were too dark or too difficult to see by the Apollo program astronauts who preceded them more than half a century ago.

A total solar eclipse also awaited them, with the moon blocking the sun, exposing snippets of shimmering corona. “We’ll get eyes on the moon, kind of map it out and then continue to go back in force,” the flight director, Judd Frieling, said.

Koch recently said that she and her Artemis II crewmates do not live on superlatives, but it was an important milestone “that people can understand and wrap their heads around”, merging the past with the present – and even the future when new records are set.

Orion was to be out of contact with mission control for 40 minutes when it is behind the moon. Nasa is relying on its Deep Space Network to communicate with the crew, but the giant antennas in California, Spain and Australia will not have a direct line of sight.

These communication blackouts were always a tense time during the Apollo missions although, as Frieling points out, “physics takes over – and physics will absolutely get us back to the front side of the moon”.

During the flyby, the astronauts planned to take turns capturing the lunar views out their windows and on being able to make out “definite chunks of the far side that have never been seen” by humans, according to Kelsey Young, Nasa’s Artemis II lunar science geologist.

Over the weekend, she said: “I’m really, really looking forward to them bringing the moon a little closer to home on Monday.”

Jared Isaacman, Nasa’s administrator, told CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday that the Artemis II astronauts “absolutely have observation responsibilities” during the flyby.

“They have a series of different cameras – they’re going to get data from that,” he said, adding that it would help future missions, including one aimed at returning to the lunar surface. “They’ve actually had an opportunity for three and a half years to train for this mission, to work with our scientists on the information they would like to gather most about the far side of the moon.”

Once the capsule rounds the moon, it will take four days to return to Earth. Nasa is aiming for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego on 10 April, nine days after its Florida launch.

Young said the Artemis II crew would survey potential landing zones for future missions, including the mysterious Reiner Gamma formation – a bright lunar swirl associated with a localized magnetic anomaly – and photograph Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn at sunrise and sunset.

Furthermore, they will attempt to recreate the Earthrise image, which was taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on 24 December 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission – and is credited with inspiring the environmental movement. There are hopes that the new photo can have the same unifying effect that the original did.

On Sunday, a CBS News reporter asked mission pilot Glover if he wished to share any thoughts on Easter.

Glover replied, in part: “In all of this emptiness – this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe – you have this oasis, this beautiful place [on Earth] that we get to exist together.

“Whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve gotta get through this together.”