It was a record-breaking mission, propelling humans a quarter of a million miles into the universe and around the Moon for the first time in more than half a century. The 10-day Artemis II project, spearheaded by Nasa, was a big step for man — but is it a bigger step for scientific understanding?
Perhaps not, but that doesn’t make the mission any less important. “This is an exploration-driven mission,” says Katherine Joy, professor of lunar and planetary science at the University of Manchester. “It’s to test technology, it’s to test protocols. It’s to test that all the systems are in place for future missions which will go down to the lunar surface.”
-rocket-with.jpeg)
Rather than being about major new discoveries, it was designed to show that we can get back to the Moon — and potentially go beyond it — in the years to come, after a long break away from significant space exploration. “It’s a complex business, getting to the Moon and back,” says Simeon Barber, senior research fellow at the Open University. But Barber explains that “it’s important to acknowledge this mission was not a science mission”.
But just because scientific discovery was secondary to proving we could get that far towards an extraterrestrial body, it doesn’t mean we didn’t learn anything. “Where there is exploration, there is always science,” says Joy.
One major discovery was a new crater on the dark side of the Moon, which the crew proposed naming Carroll, after the late wife of mission commander Reid Wiseman, who died of cancer in 2020. While naming a crater requires official approval from the International Astronomical Union, Nasa has said it is minded to champion the request to the global body. A second crater was also found, which the crew said could be called Integrity, after the name they gave the Orion spacecraft that took them into space.
This is about watching humans trying to learn how to live in space. That is the real value
We also gained a better understanding of the impact of space flight on the body. Artemis II carried several focused health experiments, including the ARCHeR (Artemis Research for Crew Health and Readiness) suite, which used wearable sensors to track the astronauts’ sleep, stress, heart-rate variability and cognitive performance in deep-space conditions beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.
“This is about watching humans trying to learn how to live in space,” says Barber. “That, I think, is the real value.”
A space rehearsal
That data will help scientists distinguish how factors such radiation, confinement, and isolation affect crew health on multi-day missions, informing countermeasures for future Artemis sorties and, eventually, Mars- bound expeditions. Additional experiments also monitored immune system changes, giving Nasa its first real-time human health dataset from a crewed lunar flyby mission.
Artemis II was an attempt to see whether humankind could voyage around the Moon, but it was also a rehearsal for how astronauts and scientists will work together on the missions that follow. Nasa used the flight to test what it calls a “lunar observations campaign”, in which the crew recorded photographs and spoken observations of the Moon’s surface so that experts on Earth could compare what trained human eyes noticed with what decades of robotic mapping have already shown.
Nasa says the exercise could help identify subtle changes in colour, texture and crater structure that cameras alone might not prioritise, while also giving mission controllers practice at feeding scientific guidance to astronauts in real time. As a result of the equipment on board, we also got a high-res update to the iconic image of Earth as a tiny blue marble.
There are also the more everyday aspects of a space mission. “A lot of the stuff they have been learning has been slightly mundane,” admits Barber. “What settings do the astronauts prefer on the air-con? Why is the water cooler not working? Why is stuff from the kitchen floating around?” But knowing all these things is important, because it means future missions can spend more time focusing on the science.
Laying the lunar foundations
And while Artemis II wasn’t as jam-packed with scientific steps forward as previous ones, there were innovations on this current mission, too. Operationally, Artemis II provided the first deep space test of Orion’s life-support systems, radiation shielding and communications in a lunar gravity environment, giving engineers critical feedback on how to refine hardware and protocols for longer duration missions.
The crew captured detailed descriptions and images of surface texture, colour, and crater morphology of the Moon’s surface that will help inform planning for landing sites for Artemis III and future robotic missions. That’s important because it’s in those future missions where we’ll see really significant scientific steps forward. “The future Artemis missions are going to the south pole of the Moon, an area we have never been to before with astronauts,” says Joy.
The mission’s larger purpose is to prepare for a sustained return rather than a symbolic visit. Nasa has now updated the wider Artemis architecture, adding another mission next year to test system capabilities before attempting a south pole landing in 2028. It means every engineering quirk fixed, every health dataset gathered and every observation protocol refined on Artemis II makes it a little more plausible that future crews will not just visit the Moon, but work there.
“This is significant, because it’s laying the foundations for missions to the Moon in future that can do things in a different way,” says Barber. “This long-term presence does have potential to change the way we do lunar exploration and, by extension, space exploration.”
