Artemis II Crew Returns to Houston

NASA’s Artemis II crew – NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen – smile at friends, family, and colleagues. They shared brief remarks with the crowd after landing at Ellington Airport near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday, April 11, 2026, after a nearly 10-day journey around the Moon and back to Earth.

View the latest imagery from the Artemis II mission on our Artemis II Multimedia Resource Page.

Image credit: NASA/Helen Arase Vargas

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Monika Luabeya

Honoring Alex Goetz, a Landsat Legend 

In the more than five decades of the Landsat program, there have been many visionaries who have changed the course of remote sensing history. One such figure is Alexander Goetz, a physicist and planetary scientist who pioneered imaging spectrometry from space.

Goetz was part of the Landsat Program from the very beginning, working as a principal investigator for Landsats 1 and 2. Years later, he returned to the program as a member of the first formal Landsat Science Team on Landsat 7. This diverse group of researchers, technologists, and calibration and applications specialists helped advance Landsat science goals, refined algorithms, and supported on-the-ground calibration. Crucially, the team advised on the creation of the long-term acquisition plan (LTAP), which ensured consistent global, seasonal coverage of Landsat data. Goetz, for his part, led a study titled “Land and Land-Use Change in the Climate Sensitive High Plains: An Automated Approach with Landsat”. 

Goetz, who passed away in 2025 at age 86, was an innovator in the field of spectrometry. According to a 2009 special issue of Remote Sensing of Environment, Goetz was “one of the few remote sensing scientists in the early days of the Landsat program to recognize the Multispectral Scanner (MSS) and later the Thematic Mapper (TM) for what they really were: quantitative spectral measuring instruments, not just ‘cameras in space’ that made pretty pictures.” 

True to that vision, in 1974—just two years after the launch of Landsat 1—Goetz developed a portable field spectrometer to acquire ground truth surface reflectance data to calibrate data from the MSS. Building on the success of the field spectrometer experiment, he worked with a team to develop the Shuttle Multispectral Infrared Radiometer (SMIRR), which flew on the Space Shuttle in 1981. SMIRR, which collected data across ten bands, enabled scientists to map mineral composition from space for the first time. Data from SMIRR contributed to the case for adding band 7 to the TM on Landsat 4. By measuring data in the shortwave-infrared (SWIR) part of the electromagnetic spectrum, band 7 allowed geological researchers to better map rock types. Goetz was awarded the prestigious William T. Pecora Award and the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for his pioneering work on imaging spectrometry. 

Today, 27 years after the launch of Landsat 7, we honor the legacy of Alexander Goetz, one of the key figures in Landsat history.

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Contours of the James Bay Lowlands

Early spring around Hudson Bay in northern Canada is largely indistinguishable from winter. Sea ice still clings to land, and the boggy lowlands remain frozen. In the dulled tones of the boreal landscape, however, snow helps accentuate the area’s subtle topography. In late March 2026, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured this photo of frozen channels feeding Hannah Bay—a southern offshoot of James Bay, which is itself an extension of Hudson Bay.

Some of the patterns visible in the photo relate to the region’s ice age history. During the Pleistocene Epoch, the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of present-day Canada. It centered on Hudson Bay, where its immense weight depressed the land. Since the Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago, the ice has retreated and the land has been bouncing back. Glacial isostatic adjustment, or isostatic rebound, is relatively rapid around southern Hudson Bay; the surface continues to rise about 10 millimeters (0.4 inches) per year, or 1 meter per century.

The process has left a fingerprint on the newly emerged land. In this photo, faint, closely spaced ridges parallel the shore of ice-covered James Bay at the terminus of the Harricana river. These beach ridges formed from tidal action reworking sands and silts along the shore, with newer ridges developing along the water as land rises and relative sea level drops.

The Harricana and adjacent waterways flow through boreal peat bogs, or muskeg, in the Hudson Bay Lowlands on their journey out to sea. As the world’s second largest peatland complex, the lowlands store significant amounts of soil carbon. Elsewhere around the bay, the landscape retains features carved by glaciers, such as drumlins and eskers.

With the approach of summer, the muted colors of the frozen months give way to a more varied palette. Peatlands take on a lush, green appearance, and partially decayed organic matter in the peat releases tannins that stain the water dark brown like a strong tea. Sea ice that has remained attached to the James Bay shoreline for several months typically begins to break up in mid- to late-May, with melting complete by the end of July.

Astronaut photograph ISS074-E-417241 was acquired on March 26, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 200 millimeters. It was provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

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March 26, 2026

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References & Resources

• EBSCO Research Starters (2024) Hudson Bay. Accessed April 14, 2026.
• GRACE Tellus, Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA). Accessed April 14, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2023, June 17) James Bay Melts Out. Accessed April 14, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2016, October 1) Some Tea With Your River? Accessed April 14, 2026.
• Price, J.S., et al. (1988) Vegetation patterns in James Bay coastal marshes. II. Effects of hydrology on salinity and vegetation. Canadian Journal of Botany, 66(12): 2586-2594. 
• Rice, J.M., et al. (2024) The surficial geology record of ice stream catchment dynamics and ice-divide migration in the Quebec-Labrador sector of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Quaternary Science Advances, 13, 100123.

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4859-4866: One Small Crater and Thousands of Polygons

Written by Abigail Fraeman, Deputy Project Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Earth planning date: Friday, April 10, 2026

Curiosity spent the past week driving towards a small crater, about 10 meters (32 feet) in diameter. Today the team informally named this crater “Antofagasta,” after a region and major city in Chile next to the Atacama. Craters are very cool for many reasons, one of which is that they act as “nature’s drill,” exposing material to the surface through their walls and ejecta that would have otherwise been buried. From orbit, Antofagasta looks like it might be a relatively young crater (less than 50 million years old, which is young on a Martian geologic scale!), so there may be material in and around the crater that was only exposed to the harsh, organic-molecule destroying radiation environment on Mars’ surface in the very recent past. Curiosity has already found many hardy organic molecules that survived billions of years, but could there be an even bigger treasure trove of complex chemistry deep below the surface? Antofagasta could help us answer this question… but only if the crater is big enough to have excavated deep rocks, if it really is relatively young, and if we are able to find a rock we are confident was excavated from depth that also meets the physical requirements for Curiosity’s drill. That’s a lot of “ifs,” but also too exciting of an opportunity to drive by! We’ll be able to answer all these “ifs” and decide what to do once we get a much closer look at the crater from the ground next week.

In the meantime, the journey to Antofagasta has been extremely interesting. Many of the rocks we’ve driven over have these incredible textures — thousands of honeycomb-shaped polygons crisscross their surface. Here’s one example, and here’s another example, both from Sol 4859. We’ve seen polygon-patterned rocks like these before, but they didn’t seem quite this dramatically abundant, stretching across the ground for meters and meters in our Mastcam mosaics. This week we continued to collect lots of images and chemical data that will help us distinguish between different hypotheses for how the honeycomb textures formed. We also continued to monitor Mars’ environment, with lots of dust-devil searches and images toward the horizon to characterize the Martian atmosphere as it grows predictably dustier approaching the warm summer months.

I’m looking forward to seeing the data that should arrive on Earth by Tuesday morning. If all goes well, Curiosity will be perched on the edge of Antofagasta, sending images that will allow us humans to see the crater rim and into the interior for the first time from the ground.

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