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Artemis II Astronauts Launch to Moon
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft lift off in this April 1, 2026, image. NASA’s Artemis II mission will take NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy on an approximately 10-day journey around the Moon and back aboard their Orion spacecraft.
Image credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
Réunion Island Lava Reaches the Sea
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Liftoff! NASA Launches Astronauts on Historic Artemis Moon Mission
Spurred by American ingenuity, astronauts on NASA’s Artemis II mission are in flight, preparing for the first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years.
NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket lifted off from Launch Pad 39B at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. EDT Wednesday, sending four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft on a planned test flight around the Moon and back.
“Today’s launch marks a defining moment for our nation and for all who believe in exploration. Artemis II builds on the vision set by President Donald J. Trump, returning humanity to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years and opening the next chapter of lunar exploration beyond Apollo. Aboard Orion are four remarkable explorers preparing for the first crewed flight of this rocket and spacecraft, a true test mission that will carry them farther and faster than any humans in a generation,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Artemis II is the start of something bigger than any one mission. It marks our return to the Moon, not just to visit, but to eventually stay on our Moon Base, and lays the foundation for the next giant leaps ahead.”
The successful launch is the beginning of an approximately 10-day mission for NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. As the first crewed mission of NASA’s Artemis program, among its objectives, the flight will demonstrate life support systems for the first time with crew and lay the foundation for an enduring presence on the Moon ahead of future missions to Mars.
After reaching space, Orion deployed its solar array wings, enabling the spacecraft to receive energy from the Sun, while the crew and engineers on the ground immediately began transitioning the spacecraft from launch to flight operations to start checking out key systems.
“Artemis II is a test flight, and the test has just begun. The team that built this vehicle, repaired it, and prepared it for flight has given our crew the machine they need to go prove what it can do,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya. “Over the next 10 days, Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy will put Orion through its paces so the crews who follow them can go to the Moon’s surface with confidence. We are one mission into a long campaign, and the work ahead of us is greater than the work behind us.”
About 49 minutes into the test flight, the SLS rocket’s upper stage fired to put Orion into an elliptical orbit around Earth. A second planned burn by the stage will propel Orion, which the crew named “Integrity,” into a high Earth orbit extending about 46,000 miles beyond Earth. After the burn, Orion will separate from the stage, flying free on its own.
In several hours, a ring on the rocket’s upper stage, which will be a safe distance away from the spacecraft, will deploy four CubeSats – small satellites from Argentina’s Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales, German Aerospace Center, Korea AeroSpace Administration, and Saudi Space Agency – to perform scientific investigations and technology demonstrations.
The spacecraft will remain in high Earth orbit for about a day, where the crew will conduct a manual pilot demonstration to test Orion’s handling capabilities. The astronauts, with Mission Control Center teams at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, will continue checking spacecraft systems.
If all systems remain healthy, mission controllers will give Orion’s European-built service module a command to conduct the translunar injection burn on Thursday, April 2. This move is an approximately six-minute firing to send the spacecraft on a trajectory that will simultaneously carry crew around the Moon, while also harnessing lunar gravity to slingshot them back to Earth.
During a planned multi-hour lunar flyby on Monday, April 6, the astronauts will take photographs and provide observations of the Moon’s surface as the first people to lay eyes on some areas of the far side. Although the lunar far side will only be partially illuminated during the flyby, the conditions should create shadows that stretch across the surface, enhancing relief and revealing depth, ridges, slopes and crater rims that are often difficult to detect under full illumination. Crew observations and other human health scientific investigations during the mission, such as AVATAR, will inform science during future Moon missions.
Following a successful lunar flyby, the astronauts will return to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean.
As part of Golden Age of innovation and exploration, NASA will send Artemis astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.
Follow the latest mission progress, including more images from the test flight, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/
-end-
Bethany Stevens / Rachel Kraft
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / rachel.h.kraft@nasa.gov
March of the Harmattan
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Godspeed, Artemis II!
NASA astronaut Jessica Meir took this photo of an Artemis program patch floating in the International Space Station’s cupola. She posted it on X on March 30, 2026, with the following caption: “Our work on the @Space_Station has provided the foundation to explore further, preparing us to return humans to the Moon this week. Stay tuned as we enter the @NASAArtemis era! Expedition 74 will certainly be keeping a close watch. Godspeed, Artemis II!”
Image credit: NASA/Jessica Meir
Landsat Reveals Reservoir Changes and Bathymetry
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Communities worldwide rely on reservoirs for drinking water, hydroelectric power, irrigation, and more. These critical freshwater resources are affected by seasonal and long-term changes; water levels in reservoirs can dip during hot summer months or due to prolonged drought, or can flood after a particularly strong storm. Despite their importance, there are key gaps in our knowledge of reservoir structure and dynamics. Two recent papers use Landsat data to help fill in those gaps.
Researchers from the University of Southampton used Landsat data to identify where water advanced or retreated from 1984 to 2022, creating the first global dataset pinpointing the exact year of permanent surface water changes—such as when a reservoir formed or a stream dried up. The study can track changes in streams as narrow as 30m and lakes as small as 900m2. In a separate study, Texas A&M University researchers used Landsat data to build a global bathymetry dataset called ‘3D-LAKES’ that enables water managers to estimate reservoir storage capacity.
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The above animation shows the Amistad Reservoir on the border of Texas and Mexico. It uses a natural-color Landsat image from 1985 overlaid onto a Copernicus Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and bathymetric data from the 3D-LAKES dataset. Vertical relief is exaggerated by a factor of four to emphasize topographic features and landforms. The reservoir is jointly managed by the U.S. and Mexico through the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) for flood control, recreation, and hydroelectric power. Despite its importance to the two countries, the reservoir is slowly shrinking. The surface water transitions dataset shows the water levels retreating in recent decades, with significant recessions between 2012 and 2016. The 3D-LAKES dataset reveals the underwater shape of the reservoir. Together, these datasets complement the in situ water level and conditions data collected throughout the year.
Tracking Surface Water TransitionsHuman communities both shape and are shaped by water. We divert rivers, build reservoirs, and construct artificial islands, while natural forces—storms, meandering rivers, and rising seas—reshape our waterways and coastlines. With satellite data as an important tool to study ecosystem dynamics, researchers have begun to build a more comprehensive global understanding of where water is and how it shifts over time. In their water transitions study, the University of Southampton team focused specifically on permanent changes in lakes, rivers, coastlines, and other water bodies worldwide.
Looking at long-term changes in surface water can help scientists understand drivers of change, said Gustavo Willy Nagel, lead researcher on the paper. Knowing when a lake began receding helps water managers investigate whether drought, irrigation, or other forces caused the decline.
Running from July 31, 1985 to November 10, 2025, this animation shows that the Amistad Reservoir levels fluctuate with the seasons but slowly decline. The time series is composed of images from Landsats 5, 7, 8, and 9. Ross Walter/NASAScientists, policymakers, and water managers can explore the interactive dataset that Nagel and his team created to visualize changes close to home as well as stark global impacts such as the drying of the Aral Sea, the lakes created by melting glaciers in Tibet, and the building of the Palm Islands in Dubai.
Assessing long-term changes in surface water presents a key challenge, as surface water is extremely dynamic. Seasonal fluctuations and climatic forces mean that rivers, lakes, and coastlines are changing all the time. To identify permanent water changes while excluding seasonal fluctuations, the researchers ran two algorithms. The first detected whether the water body was advancing or retreating over the study period using the Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (mNDWI), which uses the shortwave-infrared (SWIR) instead of the near-infrared (NIR) band. The second algorithm used the Green_Red Normalized Difference Water Index (grNDWI)—an index proposed by the research team—to identify the precise year that the water body transitioned. A change was considered “permanent” if it did not revert to its previous condition during the study period of 1984 to 2022.
“The dataset is showing, for every location on the planet, areas where water advanced or retracted and the year of that change,” said Nagel.
This screenshot from the Water Change Time Detection tool on Google Earth Engine shows the Amistad Reservoir receding over time. Red and orange represent areas where water receded, whereas blue represents areas where water advanced. Major recessions occurred between 2012 and 2016. Ross Walter/NASA Visualizing Lakes in 3DLandsat can help us monitor surface water. But what about what’s under the surface?
In a study published in Scientific Data in October 2025, researchers from Texas A&M University fused Landsat and ICESat-2 data to create bathymetry maps for half a million global lakes and reservoirs. The research team, led by Huilin Gao, used Landsat imagery to calculate the surface area of water bodies, delineate where water meets land, and track how water extent changes over time. Then, they combined laser altimetry from the ICESat-2 satellite to infer the underwater bathymetry of water bodies. With these measurements, the scientists refined area-elevation relationships, a key metric for understanding how water storage changes with water level.
This screenshot from the 3D-LAKES dataset shows bathymetry in the Amistad Reservoir. Green represents shallow waters while purple represents deeper waters. Comparing this screenshot to the results from the water change detection tool, it appears that the areas where water receded align with the shallower portions of the reservoir. Ross Walter/NASAThe resultant dataset, dubbed 3D-LAKES, is static, as bathymetry does not tend to change significantly year to year. “This dataset can support many applications, from monitoring water storage to refining hydrological models,” said Chi-Hsiang Huang, the study’s lead author.
3D-LAKES can be used in combination with Landsat-based maps—like the surface transition research or the popular Global Surface Water dataset—to help water resource managers assess the volume of water held in a reservoir or lake. This allows them to evaluate flood risk, map habitat, or calculate how much water is available during a particularly dry season. Researchers can also track changing water volume over time, helping understand long-term trends in water storage.
Measuring underwater topography has historically been expensive and impractical at global scales. The 3D-LAKES dataset now provides researchers and managers with crucial bathymetric data for lakes and reservoirs worldwide. “With this new dataset, we can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the impacts of lakes and reservoirs on regional climatology, water security, and ecosystem services,” said Gao. Both studies provide water and land managers with unprecedented tools for resource management and planning—from the Amistad Reservoir to the Australian Outback to the Brazilian Amazon.
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Sendoff for Artemis II Crew
From left to right, NASA astronauts Andre Douglas, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronauts Jenni Gibbons, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen pose for a photo before the Artemis II crew proceed to a media event on March 27, 2026. Douglas and Gibbons are the backup crew members for the mission; they would join the crew if a NASA or CSA astronaut, respectively, is unable to take part in the flight.
Artemis II is NASA’s first crewed mission under the Artemis program and will launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will send Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen on an approximately 10-day journey around the Moon. Among other objectives, the agency will test the Orion spacecraft’s life support systems for the first time with people and lay the groundwork for future crewed Artemis missions.
Image credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel
Seeing Blue During Schirmacher’s Summer Melt Season
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