The Artemis II astronauts are more than halfway to the moon. The three Americans and one Canadian will reach their destination Monday, performing a lunar flyby and then coming straight back home. They are the first moonbound crew in more than half a century, picking up where NASA's Apollo program left off. On the downside, their toilet is on the blink again. Until it is fixed, Mission Control has instructed the astronauts to break out more of the backup urine collection bags. The toilet malfunctioned following Wednesday's liftoff and has been hit and miss ever since.

NASA’s Artemis II astronauts have fired their engines and are blazing toward the moon. The so-called translunar ignition came 25 hours after liftoff, putting the three Americans and one Canadian on course for a lunar fly-around early next week. Their Orion capsule has bolted out of orbit around Earth and chased after the moon nearly 250,000 miles away. It is the first engine firing for a moon crew since Apollo 17 set out on that era’s final moonshot in 1972. NASA had the Artemis II crew stick close to home for a day to test their capsule’s life-support systems before clearing them for lunar departure.

Every year, math nerds and dessert enthusiasts unite to celebrate Pi Day on March 14, a date whose digits represent the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi. The holiday was created in 1988 by Larry Shaw, a physicist at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco. In school, you might have used it to calculate the area of a circle or the volume of a cylinder, but the applications of pi are endless and part of every corner of our world. Pi is involved in every step of aerospace engineering and is also on the cutting edge of medical research.