Want to go to the moon? Travel vicariously through the more than 12,000 photos NASA just posted from the Artemis II mission

By Meghan Bartels edited by Claire Cameron

The Artemis II mission may have been a work trip for the four astronauts onboard, but it was also the journey of a lifetime—and NASA just published the first big batch of photographs the crew took to share their experience with the rest of us.

Artemis II launched on April 1, made its closest approach to the moon on April 6 and returned to Earth on April 10. During the 10-day mission, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen captured thousands of snapshots. But because NASA prioritized mission-essential communications, we Earthlings saw just the occasional photograph during the voyage.

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Since the crew—and their full memory cards—have landed, NASA staff have been busy. “There’s a Herculean effort that goes on at the Johnson Space Center with the teams that actually have to take all these data and get them into the mission data infrastructure that allows us to process them and get them out,” said Kelsey Young, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and lunar science lead for the Artemis II mission at the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, to Scientific American last month. “The amount of data that they are now wrangling to try to get into the system is huge.”

The public’s first glimpse at that bounty—and the work it takes to organize it—comes via NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth website, which now hosts 12,217 photographs from the mission. The site’s primary search mechanisms have not been updated to include the Artemis II mission yet, but you can access the complete collection at this link. Note that it will take a while to load.

You can pull up an image at random by clicking Search Photos, scrolling down to Search Using Other Methods and entering a code, although there won’t always be a result to display. The photographs currently available may not represent the full Artemis II collection, given that the image codes run from ART002-E-168 to ART002-E-30001, suggesting there may be some 18,000 more to come.

The Artemis II lunar science team has until October, six months from the mission, to publish its preliminary reports on science and operations, plus the full Artemis II dataset, including all mission’s moon images.

Those images’ final destination will be NASA’s Planetary Data System, which houses data from every NASA mission that has been relevant to planetary science. Voice recordings that the Artemis II astronauts made during their flyby of the moon will also eventually be available there, along with a user’s guide compiled by the mission’s science team to help researchers make the most of the information.

The science team, which includes about 60 people, was eagerly poring through mission images when Young talked to Scientific American. The team members’ first step was understanding what they had—just like any other photographers, the Artemis II crew snapped their share of blurry shots and misfires.

Next, the science team members have to orient themselves in each image’s view of the moon and the lunar features on display. But for researchers, Young said, the most important moment will be pivoting from looking at individual features to filtering those views through the top 10 science priorities for the mission.

Those science objectives include studying color and brightness, which can be clues to geological history; observing the flashes that mark a meteoroid striking the lunar surface; better understanding locations considered potential landing sites for future missions; and analyzing the wispy atmosphere and any lunar dust it contains.

But while we wait for their initial findings, there are plenty of gorgeous images to gaze upon. “It’s hard not to just absolutely melt into a puddle of awe and amazement at some of the really spectacular ones,” Young said of going through the mission images. Enjoy finding your own favorites!