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NASA will provide an update on the agency’s Artemis III mission and announce the astronauts assigned to the test flight during a live event at 11 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, June 9, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The event will stream on NASA+ and on the agency’s YouTube channel. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including social media.
Following the event, the Artemis III crew will be available for limited in-person and virtual interviews.
Interview requests must be submitted to the NASA Johnson newsroom by 5 p.m. on Thursday, June 4. International media interested in attending must contact the NASA Johnson newsroom at jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov by 5 p.m., Thursday, May 28. U.S. media must contact the newsroom by 5 p.m., June 4. Registered media will receive confirmation and additional event details by email. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.
Artemis III will launch four astronauts from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard the Orion spacecraft on the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. The mission will test critical rendezvous and docking capabilities between Orion and commercial human landing systems needed to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface. Building on the successful Artemis II crewed test flight in April, Artemis III will pave the way for future surface missions.
As part of the Golden Age of innovation and exploration, NASA will send Artemis astronauts on increasingly complex missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, establish an enduring human presence on the lunar surface, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.
Learn more about NASA’s Artemis program:
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Rachel Kraft
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
rachel.h.kraft@nasa.gov
Anna Schneider
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
anna.c.schneider@nasa.gov
2026-05-26 21:05
2 min read
Students in New York will hear from NASA astronaut Jessica Meir as she answers their prerecorded science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) questions while aboard the International Space Station.
The Earth-to-space call will begin at 11:05 p.m. EDT Thursday, May 28, and will stream live on the agency’s Learn With NASA YouTube channel.
This event is hosted by the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York, for students in grades K-12 and members of the community. This unique opportunity aims to deepen understanding of space exploration and enhance awareness of STEM careers.
Media interested in covering the event must RSVP no later than 5 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, May 27, to Jerelyn Zontini at: 516-567-0537 or jzontini@cradleofaviation.org.
For more than 25 years, astronauts have continuously lived and worked aboard the space station, testing technologies, performing science, and developing skills needed to explore farther from Earth. Astronauts communicate with NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston 24 hours a day through SCaN’s (Space Communications and Navigation) Near Space Network.
Research and technology investigations taking place aboard the space station benefit people on Earth and lay the groundwork for other agency deep space missions. As part of NASA’s Artemis program, the agency will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future human exploration of Mars, inspiring the world through discovery in a new Golden Age of innovation and exploration.
For more information on NASA in-flight calls, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstation
2026-05-26 19:33

During a Moon Base event Tuesday at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington, the agency announced new contracts for lunar rovers for crew to drive and uncrewed cargo landers bound for the Moon. NASA leaders also shared target launch timeframes and upcoming milestones for the first Moon Base infrastructure and exploration missions to the lunar South Pole region ahead of Artemis astronaut landings.
“The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Every mission, crewed and uncrewed, will be a learning opportunity as we return to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure to stay, and master the skills required to live and operate in one of the most demanding and dangerous environments imaginable. We will go for the science, for all we stand to gain from an economic and technological perspective, for the innovations that will make life better here on Earth, and to prepare for where we will inevitably go next. We are grateful for President Trump’s leadership, the bipartisan commitment from Congress, our industry and international partners, and the dedicated NASA workforce whose expertise enables us to achieve the near-impossible.”
NASA announced the first three Moon Base missions to begin building sustained operations:
These missions are the first of more than a dozen missions that will be announced this year, each designed to generate operational data and reduce risk ahead of crewed Artemis surface activities.
NASA has awarded Astrolab $219 million and Lunar Outpost $220 million to build and deliver the first phase of LTVs. Awarded under the Phase 1 High Achievability Mission task orders of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract, these firm-fixed-price, performance-based milestones will enable NASA to deploy crewed and uncrewed mobility systems to the lunar surface by 2028 through the agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. Early surface mobility is a foundational component of the national space policy priority to create an enduring lunar presence.
Astrolab’s Crewed Lunar Vehicle, or CLV‑1, adapted from the company’s FLEX architecture, is a crewed rover designed to transport astronauts, carry supplies, and support remote operations, with a compact stowed configuration, a mass of about 2,000 pounds, and the ability to reach more than 6 mph on level terrain.
Complementing this capability, Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus is a lighter, mission‑ready evolution of its Eagle rover designed explicitly to meet NASA’s updated LTV requirements. Operational for up to a year and capable of manual, autonomous, or teleoperated driving at speeds more than 9 mph, Pegasus incorporates Apollo‑heritage technologies and builds on prototype and flight experience to deliver human‑centered mobility essential for establishing a sustained Moon Base.
Deploying multiple LTVs early in Moon Base development will accelerate technology demonstrations, inform site planning, and reduce operational risk ahead of crewed Artemis missions, enabling NASA to characterize terrain hazards, move materials, pre-stage resources, and mature systems needed for long-duration lunar exploration.
Over the next 18 months, the selected providers will finalize rover designs, conduct crewed evaluations, and qualify flight units for operational readiness, with the resulting LTVs supporting autonomous traverses, terrain preparation, scientific investigations, technology demonstrations, and astronaut transport.
As Moon Base efforts advance, NASA will expand opportunities for additional vendors through on‑ramp competitions, fostering a robust, sustainable approach to lunar mobility and strengthening national priorities in space capability.
To deliver these rovers to the Moon’s South Pole region, NASA awarded Blue Origin $188 million with an option period worth $280.4 million for two task orders, which includes an option period based on initial phase performance. NASA can choose to extend the task order for payload delivery.
This competitive procurement, executed under the CLPS 1.0 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity framework, the CX-2 task order represents a strategic investment in lunar exploration and will play a critical role in enabling mobility and infrastructure development for sustained lunar operations, marking a significant step toward establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon.
Building on the successes and lessons learned from CLPS 1.0, the agency also outlined how the next generation of cargo landers under CLPS 2.0 will continue to deliver payloads to the lunar surface and lunar orbit, supporting NASA’s ambitious goals for sustained lunar operations. This next phase introduces enhanced flexibility, allowing NASA to order turn-key delivery services or start accepting delivery of CLPS hardware for integration into its own missions. The final CLPS 2.0 request for proposal was released on May 15, with responses due on Tuesday, June 30.
Moonfall update
The agency also shared new updates on MoonFall, a mission that will send four drones to fly short hops on the lunar surface as they survey potential landing sites for Artemis astronauts. NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California has been developing the design and testing prototype hardware and has selected Firefly Aerospace to build the spacecraft that will transport the drones from Earth orbit to the Moon. Launch is targeted for 2028.
The drones will independently land on the lunar surface and then gather high-resolution imagery of hard-to-reach terrain over the course of a single lunar day. After each drone’s final flight, its survive-the-night payload will continue to operate for several months, marking a sustained U.S. presence at the lunar South Pole.
More robotic missions to come
Finally, NASA stated in the coming weeks that a selection of additional CLPS 1.0 task awards, issued during the agency’s Ignition event, for Moon Base payloads and technology demonstrations, is forthcoming. In the coming months, there also will be additional opportunities to compete for CLPS 1.0 and 2.0 task orders as Phase 1 technology demonstrations are defined and planned for Moon Base missions.
During the update, NASA leadership reiterated that establishing a sustained lunar presence is aligned with the agency’s broader exploration strategy, supported by increased launch cadence, expanded industry partnerships, and agencywide coordination.
As part of the Golden Age of innovation and exploration, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.
For more on Moon Base, visit:
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George Alderman / James Gannon
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
george.a.alderman@nasa.gov / james.h.gannon@nasa.gov
2026-05-26 14:49
Chennai, on India’s southern coast along the Bay of Bengal and with a metropolitan population of about 8.7 million, shines with white LED streetlights in this photograph taken at approximately 9:13 p.m. local time on May 2, 2026, from the International Space Station.
Earth observations from the space station let us see how our planet changes over time. In combination with NASA-developed technologies, these observations provide the foundation needed to explore and sustain human life on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Image credit: NASA/Chris Williams
2026-05-26 12:00
The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO) is a NASA Astrophysics Pioneers Program mission designed to detect the most energetic particles in the universe. The PUEO mission flew high above Antarctica on a Long Duration Balloon (LDB) and used the Antarctic ice sheet as an enormous detection volume to look for radio signals generated by the interactions of extremely energetic astrophysical neutrinos as they passed through the ice. In addition to searching for the highest energy neutrinos, PUEO could also detect radio signals from high energy cosmic rays showering in Earth’s atmosphere (a.k.a. air showers), either as the signals entered directly into the instrument or reflected off the ice below. The sensitivity achieved with the PUEO instrument was a result of technology advancements and careful optimization of the experimental design to enable accommodation within the balloon platform’s launch volume.
The ultra-high energy neutrinos that PUEO was searching for carry information from the most extreme places in the universe, including supermassive black holes that accrete matter at the centers of galaxies, neutron star mergers, and other powerful cosmic accelerators. Because these particles travel large distances along straight lines without being absorbed, they provide a unique view of the distant, most energetic universe. Not only will data collected by PUEO reveal the origin and composition of the highest-energy cosmic rays, it will also test fundamental physics at energies far beyond those achievable in human-made particle accelerators on Earth.
The PUEO mission built on heritage from the NASA-sponsored Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) mission, which had four successful flights from 2006-2016. Like ANITA, PUEO consisted of an array of radio-frequency antennas, an onboard data acquisition system that is triggered by neutrino-like signals and processes and saves the data, and a navigation and command and control system. From its 120,000-foot altitude, PUEO monitored an extremely large volume of Antarctic ice, looking for signals from very rare, high-energy neutrino interactions.
The first of NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers missions to launch, PUEO took off Dec. 20, 2025, from NASA’s Long Duration Balloon Facility near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, and flew for 23 days before landing approximately 120 miles (200 km) from the South Pole. The full payload has been recovered, including the data drives. The PUEO team is currently analyzing the data collected—an undertaking that may take up to a year due to the complex nature of the task.
The significant improvement in sensitivity achieved with the PUEO instrument compared to that of ANITA was due to a variety of technology advancements and careful optimization of the experimental design to enable accommodation within the balloon platform’s constrained launch volume.
At the heart of PUEO’s technology advancement was a new type of trigger called an interferometric phased array trigger. The PUEO trigger coherently summed signals from multiple antennas in real time, enabling the instrument to detect weaker signals than previously possible. By lowering the trigger threshold, PUEO could dig further into the noise, and find weaker neutrino and cosmic-ray signals than previous experiments.
The PUEO antenna collecting area for frequencies above 300 MHz was doubled compared to ANITA, improving the sensitivity to radio emission from particle interactions. To ensure the PUEO payload remained within the allowable launch volume, the team increased the low-frequency cutoff of the PUEO antennas, which enabled them to be even smaller than those used on ANITA.
To improve sensitivity to extensive air showers produced by cosmic rays and potentially neutrinos, PUEO incorporated a new low-frequency instrument that deployed once the payload reached float altitude (it would have been much too large to fit in the allowable launch volume in its flight configuration). This new low-frequency instrument incorporated antennas that are sensitive down to 50 MHz, and extended PUEOs sensitivity to air showers.
Many of the technology advancements that were developed for PUEO may also be applicable for mission concepts under development that would use the lunar regolith as a detector for ultra-high energy cosmic rays, and other potential future radio missions on the moon.
Project Lead: Dr. Abigail Vieregg, David N. Schramm Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and professor of Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics, and the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, assisted by graduate student, Rachel Scrandis
Sponsoring Organization(s): NASA Astrophysics Division Pioneers Program
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