Artemis II images to help UCF researchers
During the Artemis II lunar flyby on Monday, the astronauts onboard took thousands of photos and made geological observations of around 35 targets on the far side of the moon. The astronauts were the first to see the far side of the moon from that perspective, and the data they collected will help planetary scientists here on Earth.
SEE PHOTOS: NASA releases first images from moon flyby
At the University of Central Florida, planetary scientist Addie Dove is preparing to send an instrument to the lunar surface as early as 2028. Lunar-VISE aims to understand Gruithuisen Domes – a puzzling geological structure on the moon and a structure that the mission observed. Scientists have no idea how it was formed. Lunar-VISE could unlock that mystery.
Dove and her team plan to use images from the Artemis II flyby to maximize the data they can collect.
“Thinking about some of the viewing angles and some of the way they described what they were able to see at different times on the surface, that's really interesting to think about when we're thinking about our operations,” Dove said. “We're primarily a lander and a rover, but we do plan to take some observations as we're orbiting the moon before we land, and then we're taking images as we descend.”
Dove said the trajectory the mission has taken will be very impactful on the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS. The insights gathered from the journey will facilitate an easier journey for American companies’ lunar science payloads.
“The way they did the observations, and thinking about how they flew over, and some of the trajectories that we might be on during our initial flybys on our mission, and just sort of the impetus that's coming out of [the Artemis II] mission, I do think will be really impactful going forward,” Dove said.
A lunar science team at the Johnson Space Center in Houston spoke in real time with the Artemis II astronauts as they made their observations. This combination of science and engineering is new for lunar exploration. Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, who is not affiliated with Lunar-VISE, said that collaboration is a positive thing to see.
“It’s the real-time discovery they're doing which helps us be there with them [and is] hugely helped by the folks in the science back room at Mission Control,” Byrne said. “We have folks on console in Mission Control who are scientists as well. That marrying of the kind of exploration, engineering side of things, and the science side of things is not something we saw to the same extent in Apollo, but it undergirds much of what's happening in Artemis.”
The images from the flyby are captivating the public as NASA began releasing them Tuesday, but the picture would be incomplete without the Artemis II crew’s visual survey of the moon. And they're also inspiring brand new questions for up-and-coming planetary scientists.
“When we train students, we tell them, ‘you can take all the photos you want’, but a really important part of any kind of field-based exercise of any kind is to also narrate what you see,” Byrne said. “We would usually have students write stuff in their journals or notebooks and sketch what they see.
He said the camera gives an objective view, but “the eye is such an amazingly sensitive instrument, much more than any camera we have.”
The Artemis II crew officially began their trip home at the conclusion of Monday’s flyby. Their capsule will punch through Earth’s atmosphere Friday evening before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, signaling the end of the nearly 10-day mission that took the crew farther into space than any other humans.
Trump administration proposes to cut NASA’s budget again
The Trump administration proposed around a 25% cut in NASA’s annual budget for next fiscal year -- echoing its proposal from last year.
The proposal must obtain the approval of Congress to be set into motion. The cuts proposed by the Trump administration for the 2026 fiscal year received bipartisan pushback. Ultimately, NASA only received minor cuts to its annual budget.
The newest proposal aims to cut $3.4 billion for NASA science, around 47% – one of the largest in the agency’s history, second only to last year’s proposal, according to an analysis by space advocacy group The Planetary Society. It also proposed a reduction in civil servants from the current 14,000, down to 11,000 employees.
“By cutting unnecessary and overpriced activities, the Budget strengthens the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) focus and ensures that every dollar spent propels America’s dominance in the final frontier,” the proposal stated.
Casey Drier, Chief of Policy at The Planetary Society, called the cuts draconian.
“These are not efficient. You don't get efficiency by slaughtering something and breaking it in two,” Drier said. “It directs NASA to plan for these awful cuts, and so it can't plan for the future. It is distracted from executing the program of record, and it just burns all this time. It's inefficient, almost by design, ironically, given the stated goals of this administration. It is a is a wasteful exercise, but a serious one.”
Drier called the proposal “copy-and-paste” from the 2026 fiscal year budget proposal. The proposal includes missions cancelled in last year’s budget, including the Mars Sample Return.
The NASA budget slightly increased funding for the Artemis missions. The budget was proposed just two days after the launch of Artemis II, which sent humans back to the moon for the first time in over 50 years. Drier worried about potential bitterness directed at the mission.
“If you build Artemis on the backs of all these other projects that are popular among various other constituencies, Artemis itself will have a target. It'll be seen fairly or not as being the cause of the destruction of all these other things.” Drier said. “For the long-term success of Artemis, you want a healthy rest of NASA to not engender this kind of political divide and partisanship getting injected into this.”
The budget proposal contradicts many of the recent statements from the agency. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said he would increase the number of civil servants, contrary to the budget cuts.
The inconsistencies don’t stop there, Drier said.
“There's a lot of questions raised by this budget, because a lot of what we heard at the NASA ignition event a few weeks ago is just fundamentally incompatible, if not outright contravened by what this proposal says,” Drier said. “Another example of that is commercial low Earth orbit space stations. NASA a couple weeks ago [...] we want to build attachments to the ISS and keep running it longer. This budget says, ‘Nope, we're building two free flying commercial stations.’ We're deorbiting ISS in 2030. These are fundamentally incompatible statements. One is an official statement of policy. The other one is what NASA administrators said two weeks ago. So, which one is true?”
