Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
For the first time since 1972, a crew of astronauts boarded a spacecraft last month and did a flyby of the Moon. The Artemis II mission was 10 days long and in addition to NASA, the Green Bank Observatory monitored the trajectory of the spacecraft to ensure it was a safe and successful mission.
GBO observational astronomer Will Armentrout and Green Bank Telescope operator Zachary Graham were part of the crew that worked with NASA on the mission.
“We have a history of working with NASA, so for this observation, they reached out toward the end of last year and said, ‘we’d like to develop this new capability to track crewed spacecraft around the moon,’” Armentrout said. “We spun up this program where they transmitted from one of their antennas in California, bounced it off the spacecraft and we received.”
Armentrout was part of the crew at GBO that worked with NASA when the Perseverance Rover was sent to Mars, but this was the first crewed mission the GBO observed.
The GBO monitored the Artemis II for six hours a day, five of the 10 days it was in orbit. Since the GBT only observes one thing at a time, the operators had to make sure the schedule had space for the mission.
“We knew that this was coming pretty far in advance and we had windows that were open,” Graham said. “The schedulers had that all blocked out ahead of time and whenever they were ready to go at NASA, we just said, ‘okay, we cleared everything and we’re ready for you.’”
The observation of the mission went really well, with only a couple little hiccups.
“For my part, everything went super smoothly,” Graham said. “There were a couple little hiccups that were things we were able to resolve pretty quickly, but everything was super smooth and nothing really out of the ordinary.”
“I would echo what Zack said about the observations running very smoothly,” Armentrout said. “Everyone at the observatory made a pact not to break anything before, so we had a good system going into these observations,” he joked.
“It went really well,” he continued. “From my end, I would call in and work with the operators, work with Zack for getting control of the telescope. Our mission in Green Bank was to track the Artemis spacecraft and receive the radar reflection that was coming back from it.”
The GBO crew worked with NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory in California, which was doing real time analysis of the data from the Artemis II.
“We were receiving the signal, so things that we had to worry about here were one, we had a good stable system; two, that we were pointed in the right spot that we were tracking the spacecraft; and three, that the data coming in all looked good – had good quality data, strong radar returns,” Armentrout said.
Those little hiccups that occurred were a minor deviation from the planned trajectory, so when the GBO crew noticed something was off, they contacted California and were informed that the crew made a couple changes to the trajectory, but everything was okay.
“Throughout the observations, we found that the trajectory that we were tracking matched pretty well what NASA was measuring, except for one day when it was slightly off,” Armentrout said. “It turned out that the astronauts, that day, made two manual maneuvers that weren’t captured in the trajectory that mission control put out for the spacecraft.
“We were able to show in real time, yes, this system does what we’re saying that it can actually do,” he added.
Collaborating with NASA has always been a success for the GBO and plans are to continue collaborating, especially with future crewed spacecraft missions.
“They’re interested,” Armentrout said. “The next Artemis mission, Artemis III, will be a low Earth orbit mission where they’re just barely out of the atmosphere, moving around the Earth, testing docking mechanisms. Artemis IV will be the next mission to the moon.
“We won’t be involved in Artemis III, but the plans are for us to be involved in Artemis IV for the same type of observations,” he continued. “We’re measuring the trajectory and really serving as a contingency plan for being able to identify where the spacecraft is in case of any kind of communication failures on board.”
In the meantime, the GBT has a full schedule of observations for other collaborations and individual projects.
“There are always big projects,” Graham said. “That’s one thing I didn’t realize growing up here. You know that the observatory is here, and you know people who work here, but you don’t really know what goes on here.
“It’s not necessarily working with NASA for a manned trip to the moon, but we always have big projects that we’re working on and that’s one of the coolest things that I’ve been able to see as an operator,” he added.
“Our mandate from the National Science Foundation is to provide a facility that meets the needs of astronomers around the country and around the world, so that leads into all these really cool projects at the cutting edge of what people are able to think about doing with a gigantic telescope in the mountains of West Virginia,” Armentrout said.
