Giant radio telescope sees Artemis 2 astronauts on Orion flying around the moon. ‘There are 4 people in those pixels.’

Here’s a unique view of NASA’s Artemis 2 moon mission.

A giant radio telescope in West Virginia tracked Artemis 2‘s Orion spacecraft around the moon for five days, gathering precise observations on its movements from over 200,000 miles away during the historic mission.

The observations came from the U.S. National Science Foundation Green Bank Telescope (NSF GBT).

Reaching 485 feet (148 meters) up into the sky and weighing 17 million (7.7 million kilograms) pounds, with a dish that covers about 2.3 acres (0.9 hectares), the massive steerable telescope is the largest moving structure on land.

“With the GBT, we were able to track the movement of the spacecraft within 0.2 millimeters per second of what NASA calculated in its projections,” Anthony Remijan, the observatory site director, said in a May 6 statement.

“It’s like having a speedometer in your car that can track your speed within 0.0004 decimal places per hour,” he continued.

The observatory released a pixelated image that the telescope captured of Orion while it was over 213,000 miles (343,000 km) from Earth. The vertical axis shows distance to the capsule, which the Artemis 2 crew named “Integrity,” with the distance increasing downward.

“There are four people in those pixels,” Will Armentrout, an NSF GBO scientist, said while presenting to colleagues at the NSF GBO.

The NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory said that these observations show how the radio telescope can help on future space missions, both for NASA and for commercial aerospace companies.

“It’s exciting when projects like this put our NSF facilities in national headlines,” Linnea Avallone, NSF chief officer for research facilities, said in the same statement. “Being able to offer inter-agency support to our colleagues at NASA makes the most of all our capabilities.”

The Green Bank Telescope also provided radar support to NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) in 2022. That mission saw NASA deliberately smash a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, showing that we can knock an asteroid off course in case a dangerous one ever heads toward Earth.