Artemis II Heat Shield After Splashdown

Shortly after NASA’s Artemis II mission splashed down on April 10, 2026, U.S. Navy divers captured underwater imagery of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield. In the months after, the agency measured whether the thermal protection system effectively safeguarded the crew and Orion systems as the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere. This rigorous analysis confirmed that the heat shield performed as expected.

Learn how Orion’s heat shield was examined.

Image credit: US Navy

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I Am Artemis: Allison Mjoen

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I Am Artemis: Allison Mjoen

As the supercooled propellant flowed into the core stage, and NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket roared to life, Allison Mjoen and her family watched with awe and pride. Mjoen, NASA’s operations manager for the agency’s Exploration Ground Systems Program, helped shape the systems and ground operations that will one day send humans back to the Moon. Over her 20-year career at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, she supported missions across the Space Shuttle Program, the International Space Station, and now she is applying that experience to Artemis.

April 1, 2026, was a bright, crystal-clear day along the Florida Space Coast. The sunlight seemed to sharpen every color along the horizon. As Mjoen and her children counted down and the crowd’s voices rose around them, the rumble of the SLS rocket intensified beneath their feet. For her children, it was the chance to see what their mom had helped make possible. For Mjoen, it was a moment she would never forget.

That moment also offered a pause for reflection on the work that led her there. As the spacecraft offline operations manager, Mjoen coordinates the work that happens long before launch day. By supporting the ground systems’ senior vehicle operations manager, Matt Czech, she develops integration plans and oversees ground operations for Artemis vehicle processing, focusing on booster and Orion spacecraft operations.

Mjoen began her career as a flight crew systems engineer with United Space Alliance supporting the Space Shuttle Program. Her team handled mission-specific cabin configurations, including the food, spacesuits, cargo, and payloads astronauts needed aboard the shuttle.

After the Space Shuttle Program retired, she supported the International Space Station Program as a payload integration engineer. In this role, she connected experiment investigators with the organizations developing their hardware. She later worked in the Project Office on the Test and Operations Support Contract before joining NASA’s Operations Project Engineering Office, where she served as the Spacecraft Payloads Integration and Evolution Element lead for Artemis I.

“Early on, I thought every decision had to be perfect, but everything is an opportunity to learn, especially the tasks that seem unrelated at the time. It’s about staying curious, working hard, building relationships, and trusting that each step is preparing you for the next one.

Allison Mjoen

Operations Manager, NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems

That preparation took on new meaning when she first supported integrated firing room operations as a certified operations project engineer during Artemis I. Earning the certification was a milestone. Applying it during real time operations brought a new level of responsibility.

“Every decision and communication directly supported the integrated team’s ability to execute safely and properly implement the test procedure,” said Mjoen.

Working at the integration console underscored the importance of preparation, collaboration and trust — lessons she carries into her work coordinating across teams today.

“I get to collaborate everyday with incredibly talented and dedicated people who are all working toward the same goal. It’s especially rewarding to know that our collective efforts directly contribute to the success of the mission.”

Allison Mjoen

Operations Manager, NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems

For Mjoen, the shared experience is part of what makes Artemis so important. As the Artemis program continues, she looks forward to another moment families will be able to share as astronauts return to the lunar surface.

“That single moment captured the imagination of people around the world and showed what is possible when we come together for a bold goal,” she said of the first Apollo Moon landing. “Artemis is creating that kind of moment for a whole new generation, and this time to stay.”

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NASA’s Hubble Spies Spiral’s Edge

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the edge-on, intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 1827, located roughly 37 million light-years away in the constellation Columba, the Dove. Hubble captured the image as part of a survey looking at 260 satellite galaxies around 22 Milky Way-like host galaxies within a radius of about 32 million light-years from Earth. Hubble has already observed 111 of these satellite galaxies. The remaining galaxies will take an additional 149 Hubble orbits, one orbit for each galaxy, to observe.

The image, taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, reveals bright-blue regions along the galaxy’s disk dotted with dark dust lanes where new stars are likely forming. A bright foreground star appears just to the left of the galaxy’s bright central bulge but is located between us and the galaxy. Its four diffraction spikes are the result of light bending around the internal supports that hold Hubble’s secondary mirror.

Low-mass galaxies like the ones in this Hubble observing program provide a way to test the predictions of cosmological models on small scales, which struggle to match observations. The data Hubble gathers will help us better understand and characterize the properties of low-mass galaxies in Milky Way-like systems, allowing researchers to refine cosmological models.

Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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