Preparing for Artemis II: Training for a Mission Around the Moon

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Preparing for Artemis II: Training for a Mission Around the Moon

Four astronauts will soon travel beyond low Earth orbit and fly around the Moon on Artemis II, a mission that will test NASA’s systems and hardware for human exploration of deep space. 

Since June 2023, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen have been preparing for their lunar journey. The approximately 10-day mission will test the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by the crew, while requiring the quartet to operate with greater autonomy and make critical decisions far from Earth.

Training for Artemis II is all risk mitigation. By preparing the astronauts and flight controllers for what they might encounter, we enable mission success.

Artemis II Chief Training Officer

Jacki Mahaffey

Unlike missions to the International Space Station, Artemis II offers no nearby safe harbor and no option to be back on Earth within hours of a problem. Training reflects that reality. Crews are prepared not just to follow procedures, but to understand spacecraft systems well enough to adapt when conditions change. 

Training began with mission fundamentals, including how Orion and SLS systems function individually and together. From there, the crew progressed through phases of training that moved from routine on-orbit operations to more complex mission segments such as ascent, entry, and landing. Each phase builds on the last as the crew moves closer to flight. 

In parallel, astronauts trained in medical operations, exercise systems, spacesuits, and daily life aboard Orion. Together, these elements form a single, integrated mission timeline. 

Observing the Moon Through the Lens 

A key part of Artemis II training includes lunar observation and photography. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, astronauts studied the Moon’s far side, learning to identify crater shapes, surface textures, color variations, and reflectivity. 

Although Artemis II will not land on the Moon, the crew will conduct detailed observations from lunar orbit to prepare for future Artemis missions.  

Flight Training at Ellington Field 

In addition to classroom instruction and simulations, the Artemis II crew trains in T-38 jet aircraft at Johnson’s Ellington Field. The T-38 exposes astronauts to high-workload, dynamic flight conditions that build spatial awareness and adaptability, skills that translate directly to decision-making under pressure in spaceflight.  

Protecting Crew Health in Deep Space 

The crew donned their Orion Crew Survival System spacesuits during training to support testing of Orion’s environmental control and life support systems. The suit provides pressure, oxygen, and thermal protection during launch, entry, and contingency scenarios while Orion’s life support systems manage cabin oxygen, water, temperature, and overall crew health throughout the mission. 

Mastering Orion Systems and Simulations 

Inside the Orion Mission Simulator at Johnson, the crew rehearsed every phase of the mission, from routine operations to emergency response. Simulations are designed to teach astronauts how to diagnose failures, manage competing priorities, and make decisions with delayed communication from Earth. 

Through this process, the quartet learned every aspect of the Orion crew module’s interior, including how to navigate onboard displays and execute the procedures used to fly and monitor the spacecraft. 

Science Preparation and Geology Training

While Artemis II astronauts will not land on the Moon, the geology fundamentals they develop during field training in remote environments are critical to meeting the mission’s science objectives. 

During the mission, the crew will examine a targeted set of surface features, including craters and regolith, from orbit. Astronauts will document variations in color, reflectivity, and texture to help scientists interpret geologic history. 

Preparing for Splashdown and Recovery 

The mission will conclude when the Artemis II mission splashes down.

The crew worked through splashdown and recovery operations at the agency’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. They rehearsed how to exit the Orion spacecraft safely in different scenarios, stabilize the spacecraft, and board a raft – skills they will rely on after returning from their mission around the Moon. 

The Crew is Go for Launch 

The Artemis II crew also completed integrated ground systems tests at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. These included suited tests, full mission rehearsals, and launch-day dry runs that walked astronauts through every step, from traveling to the launch pad to entering Orion at Launch Pad 39B. 

As Artemis II moves closer to launch, the focus shifts from preparation to readiness as the crew enters the next era of exploration beyond low Earth orbit.  

About the Author

Sumer Loggins

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Sumer Loggins

Goldstone’s DSS-15 Antenna and the Milky Way

Deep Space Station 15, one of the 112-foot antennas at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, looks skyward, with the stars of the Milky Way overhead, in September 2025. Goldstone is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), which operates three complexes around the globe that support communications with dozens of deep space missions.

The DSN is NASA’s international array of giant radio antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions, plus a few that orbit Earth. The DSN also provides radar and radio astronomy observations that improve our understanding of the solar system and the larger universe.

Through Artemis, NASA is establishing an enduring presence in space and exploring more of the Moon than ever before. To achieve this, Artemis missions rely on both the Deep Space Network and the Near Space Network. These networks, with oversight by NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program office, use global infrastructure and relay satellites to ensure seamless communications and tracking as Orion launches, orbits Earth, travels to the Moon, and returns home.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Monika Luabeya

Resurrecting Ancient Enzymes in NASA’s Search for Life Beyond Earth

NASA-supported scientists have resurrected an enzyme first used by organisms on Earth 3.2-billion years ago and, in the process, have validated a chemical biosignature in rocks that is used to understand ancient life on Earth. The research provides a new understanding of what Earth’s biosphere was like early in our planet’s history and confirms  a reliable biosignature that could be used by robotic or human explorers to look for signs of ancient life on other worlds.

Nitrogen, Earth’s biosphere

The study, published in Nature Communications on Jan. 22 , focuses on a type of metabolism called nitrogen fixation, or diazotrophy. This process is what converts biologically unusable nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere into molecules that all living organisms use to survive.
 
On Earth, there is a select group of organisms called diazotrophs that can perform nitrogen fixation. This group is a motley crew of bacteria (and a few archaea and eukaryotes) that are found dotted across different branches of the tree of life. Some diazotrophs are free-living organisms that fix nitrogen as they go about their day. Others are symbiotic and survive in partnership with other organisms, living in places like plant roots, lichens, fungi, and even the guts of termites and shipworms.
 
What ties this varied group of organisms together is that they all contain an enzyme called nitrogenase. This enzyme gives them the power to convert nitrogen gas from the atmosphere into compounds that are essential for building some of life’s most important molecules, such as proteins and DNA. Specifically, they convert diatomic nitrogen (N₂) into biologically useful forms of nitrogen such as ammonia (NH₃), thereby allowing nitrogen to enter the food chain.
 
In this way, every organism in Earth’s entire biosphere relies on diazotrophs to provide the nitrogen we all need to survive.

Nitrogenase through time

Because nitrogen fixation is critical for life as we know it, scientists believe that nitrogenase must have evolved early in life’s history, at a time when only single-celled microorganisms existed. 

“Early life on Earth operated under conditions so different from today that it may have appeared almost alien,” said Betül Kaçar, who leads the Kaçar Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With support from NASA, Kaçar and her team are working to understand the history of life at a planetary scale and the potential for life in the universe by rebuilding extinct biochemistries used by ancient organisms. “Studying these systems helps us understand not just where life can exist, but what life can be.”

Details about early life on Earth are obscure because the fossils microorganisms leave behind in the rock record can be ambiguous or difficult to attribute. However, when nitrogen from the atmosphere is fixed, it is slightly altered in a way scientists can recognize. The isotopic signature of the nitrogen atoms within the diazotroph is changed. Over time, as the microorganisms die, this altered nitrogen gets incorporated into rocks. Sediments are laid down, become buried, compressed, worn, and churned through the ages of the Earth. Yet even after billions of years, scientists can still identify the N-isotope biosignature left by ancient diazotrophs in the geological record.

By looking at the N-isotope record, scientists can thereby estimate when nitrogenase enzymes first appeared.

Building ancient enzyme

Questions about the accuracy of using N-isotopes as a biosignature have been raised in the past. Like life itself, enzymes evolve over time. As environmental conditions on Earth change, enzymes are altered at the molecular level in response. The original nitrogenase was likely smaller and less complicated than the version we see in organisms now. This means that the N-isotope signatures left behind by ancient nitrogenase enzymes could be different than the ones we see today.

To solve the question of whether N-isotopes can indeed be used as a robust biosignature, the team used synthetic biology techniques to resurrect possible ancient versions of the enzyme. They reverse-engineered modern nitrogenase, peeling away layers of evolution to reveal simpler versions of the enzyme that might have existed long ago. 

The behaviors of the older versions of the enzyme were then observed when they were inserted into living microbes. What they found is that N-isotope signatures have remained the same for billions of years. The results prove that the isotopic signatures of nitrogen fixation in Earth’s oldest rocks do indeed reflect the activity of early life.

“As you step back in time, the DNA sequences of these ancient nitrogenases are very different than modern nitrogenases,” said Holly Rucker, a doctoral candidate in the Kaçar Lab and lead author on the paper. “We also see that the enzyme structure varies with age. Yet we find that despite these sequence and structure-level differences, these ancient enzymes still do the same chemistry as their modern descendants.”

The collection of synthetic genes created by the team also represent different versions of nitrogenase that would have existed over a span of two billion years of evolutionary history. This has helped fill in gaps of knowledge about how nitrogenase has changed over time, and what ancient nitrogen fixers were like. 

“This research reveals how robust nitrogenase (and its associated N-isotope signature) are to change, at both an enzyme sequence level and at the planetary environment level,” explains Rucker. “The fact that the ancestral nitrogenases produce the same isotopic signature throughout billions of years of molecular tinkering, and in the face of drastic changes to the Earth’s environment, really highlights the potential of N-isotopes as a biosignature. Another key aspect of this work is that it provides further validation of our interpretation of the most ancient nitrogenase signatures in the rock record on Earth, which is important for understanding the timing of when critical metabolisms like nitrogen fixation emerged on Earth.”

Because nitrogen fixation is such an important part of biology on Earth, the research could also provide clues in the search for life beyond our planet.

“If we want to recognize life beyond Earth, we can’t limit ourselves to life as we know it today,” said Kaçar.

Nitrogenase, search for life

Now that scientists have validated the use of N-isotopes as a biosignature for ancient life on Earth, the same technique could potentially be used on other rocky worlds. 

“Validated biosignatures like nitrogen isotopes give us a powerful tool for planetary exploration and access to lost biological histories” said Kaçar. “If similar signals are found on Mars or other rocky worlds, they could point to ancient metabolisms that once supported life under very different conditions. Studying these systems helps us understand not just where life can exist, but what life can be.”

For more information on astrobiology at NASA, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/astrobiology

-end-

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov  / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

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Hubble Sees Galaxy with Dark Rings in New Light

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Hubble Sees Galaxy with Dark Rings in New Light

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features an uncommon galaxy with a striking appearance. NGC 7722 is a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

A lenticular, meaning “lens-shaped,” galaxy is a type whose classification sits between more familiar spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies. It is also less common than spirals and ellipticals — partly because these galaxies have a somewhat ambiguous appearance, making it hard to determine if it is a spiral, an elliptical, or something in between. Many of the known lenticular galaxies sport features of both spiral and elliptical. In this case, NGC 7722 lacks the defined arms of a spiral galaxy, while it has an extended, glowing halo and a bright bulge in its center like an elliptical galaxy. Unlike elliptical galaxies, it has a visible disk — concentric rings swirl around its bright nucleus. Its most prominent feature, however, is undoubtedly the long lanes of dark red dust coiling around the outer disk and halo.

This new Hubble image, the sharpest taken of NGC 7722, brings the galaxy’s impressive dust lanes into sharp focus. Bands of dust like this are not uncommon in lenticular galaxies, and they stand out against the broad, smooth halo of light that typically surrounds lenticulars. Astronomers think NGC 7722’s distinctive dust lanes are the result of a past merger with another galaxy, similar to other lenticular galaxies. Researchers do not fully understand how lenticular galaxies form, but they think mergers and other gravitational interactions play an important part in reshaping galaxies and exhausting their supplies of gas while bringing new dust.

While it doesn’t host as many new, young stars as a spiral galaxy, there’s still activity in NGC 7722: in 2020 it was host to the explosion of a star that astronomers detected from Earth. SN 2020SSF was a Type Ia supernova, an event that occurs when a white dwarf star in a binary system siphons enough mass away from its companion star that it grows unstable and explodes. These explosions output a remarkably consistent level of light: by measuring how bright they appear from Earth and comparing that to how bright they intrinsically are, astronomers can tell how far away they must be. Type Ia supernovae are one of the best ways to measure distances to galaxies, so understanding exactly how they work is of great importance for astronomy.

Taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, this Hubble image was obtained as part of an observing program (#16691, PI: R. J. Foley) that followed up on recent supernovae. SN 2020SSF, is not visible in this image. Researchers purposefully observed NGC 7722 two years after the supernova faded to witness the supernova’s aftereffects and examine its surroundings, which can only be accomplished once the intense light of the explosion is gone. With Hubble’s clear vision, astronomers can search for radioactive material created by the supernova, catalog its neighbors to help determine the original star’s age, and look for the companion star it left behind — all from almost 200 million light-years away.

Text Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)

Media Contact:

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

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Dark Rings and New Light

This release on ESA/Hubble’s website

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Extreme January Cold

In the wake of a winter storm that blanketed numerous U.S. states with snow and ice, unusually low temperatures continued to grip a large swath of the nation east of the Rockies in late January 2026. The cold spell was notable for severity, longevity, and geographic scope.

This animation depicts surface air temperatures across part of the Northern Hemisphere, including North America, from January 21 to 29. It combines satellite observations with temperatures calculated by a version of the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) global model, which uses mathematical equations to simulate physical processes in the atmosphere.

Dark blue areas indicate the lowest surface air temperatures. The brief pulses show daily warming and cooling, while the broader pattern reveals cold air spreading south and east and lingering through much of the week.

According to the National Weather Service (NWS), the surge of Arctic air pushed deep into the United States on January 22, ushering in a period of low temperatures and harsh wind chills. The cold coincided with a jet of moisture to produce significant accumulations of snow and ice spanning from the U.S. Southwest to New England.

In the days after the storm, dangerously cold weather persisted. In the Midwest, for example, the temperature in Alliance, Nebraska, dropped to minus 26 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 32 degrees Celsius) on January 24, the lowest daily minimum temperature for that date on record, according to preliminary NWS reports. In the South, an extreme cold warning was in effect in south-central Texas overnight on January 26, with temperatures dipping into the single digits. By January 27, parts of the South had started to see slight warming, but wind chills down to -20°F (-29°C) continued across the Midwest and Northeast.

According to meteorologists, the cold snap was caused by frigid air from the Canadian and Siberian Arctic funneling into eastern North America, then being driven south as high-pressure systems forced the jet stream to dip. Forecasts called for another blast of Arctic air late in the week, with below-normal temperatures persisting into early February.

The lingering cold has posed extra challenges to those who remained without power or heat after the storm and for those working to clean up, clear streets, and restore power and transportation services.

NASA’s Disasters Response Coordination System has been activated to support agencies responding to the winter storm. The team will be posting maps and data products on its open-access mapping portal as new information becomes available.

NASA Earth Observatory images and animation by Lauren Dauphin, using GEOS data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

References & Resources

• The Conversation (2026, January 24) How the polar vortex and warm ocean intensified a major US winter storm. Accessed January 29, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2026, January 28) Snow Buries the U.S. Interior and East. Accessed January 29, 2026.
• NBC News (2026, January 27) Millions remain under warnings as extreme cold has icy grip on much of the U.S. Accessed January 29, 2026.
• NWS Weather Prediction Center, via X (2026, January 27) Dangerously cold temperatures continue. Accessed January 29, 2026.
• The Washington Post (2026, January 28) Extreme cold spell shaping up as one of D.C.’s longest in 150 years. Accessed January 29, 2026.
• Yale Climate Connections (2026, January 23) Winter 2025-26 (finally) hits the U.S. with a vengeance. Accessed January 29, 2026.

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