Who are the astronauts on the Artemis II mission?

This April, a team of four astronauts will be the first people to travel around the Moon since the 1970s.

They are, of course, the Artemis mission team.

This flight is called Artemis II, and After some delays it'll blast-off on a 10-day test mission round the Moon and back again.

The astronauts will travel in Orion, Nasa's deep‑space capsule that sits on top of the rocket.

The mission will swing past the far side of the Moon (that's the side we don't see from Earth because the Moon keeps the same face towards us) before heading home.

The crew will travel further from Earth than any humans before them, so who are the four people are on the brink of making history?

First up we have mission captain Reid Wiseman.

Reid is 50 and grew up near Baltimore in the US. He served as a US Navy pilot and test pilot, became a NASA astronaut in 2009, and spent 165 days on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2014.

When he was picked to lead Artemis II, he said his daughters baked him "moon cupcakes."

Pilot Victor Glover is one of three members of the crew who will be making history by being a part of it.

He is set to become the first Black astronaut to fly on a Moon mission and will pilot the Orion capsule.

He's previously flown to the ISS as pilot of SpaceX Crew‑1 and lived there from November 2020 to May 2021.

He said in a recent Q&A that it's lovely to know young black kids may be looking at him and being inspired, but he also hopes that as time goes on "we don't have to talk about these firsts."

Christina Koch is one of two mission specialists on the team.

An electrical engineer, Christina holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman (328 days, 2019–2020) and took part in the first all‑female spacewalks.

She got the call asked her to be a part of the Artemis crew when she was on a research mission at the South Pole, and has apparently had to give her dog a lot of reassurance that she won't be gone as long this time.

No woman has so far stood on the surface of the Moon, and although she won't step foot on the lunar surface as part of the Artemis II mission, Koch will make history as first woman to travel round the Moon.

And finally, we have Jeremy Hansen, the second of the mission specialists

Jeremy grew up on a farm in Ontario and became a Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot before joining the Canadian Space Agency.

He will be the first Canadian to travel on a Moon mission.

Not only is he an astronaut, he's also an aquanaut with Nasa, going on missions underwater - he once lived underwater for seven whole days!