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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Gateway’s HALO module at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Gilbert, Arizona, on April 4, 2025, shortly after its arrival from Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy. NASA/Josh Valcarcel NASA continues to mark progress on plans to work with commercial and international partners as part of the Gateway program. The primary structure of HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) arrived at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Gilbert, Arizona, where it will undergo final outfitting and verification testing.
HALO will provide Artemis astronauts with space to live, work, and conduct scientific research. The habitation module will be equipped with essential systems including command and control, data handling, energy storage, power distribution, and thermal regulation.
Following HALO’s arrival on April 1 from Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy, where it was assembled, NASA and Northrop Grumman hosted an April 24 event to acknowledge the milestone, and the module’s significance to lunar exploration. The event opened with remarks by representatives from Northrop Grumman and NASA, including NASA’s Acting Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Lori Glaze, Gateway Program Manager Jon Olansen, and NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik. Event attendees, including Senior Advisor to the NASA Administrator Todd Ericson, elected officials, and local industry and academic leaders, viewed HALO and virtual reality demonstrations during a tour of the facilities.
Dr. Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, and Dr. Jon B. Olansen, Gateway Program manager, on stage during an April 24, 2025, event at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Gilbert, Arizona, commemorating HALO’s arrival in the United States. Northrop Grumman While the module is in Arizona, HALO engineers and technicians will install propellant lines for fluid transfer and electrical lines for power and data transfer. Radiators will be attached for the thermal control system, as well as racks to house life support hardware, power equipment, flight computers, and avionics systems. Several mechanisms will be mounted to enable docking of the Orion spacecraft, lunar landers, and visiting spacecraft.
Launching on top of HALO is the ESA (European Space Agency)-provided Lunar Link system which will enable communication between crewed and robotic systems on the Moon and to mission control on Earth. Once these systems are installed, the components will be tested as an integrated spacecraft and subjected to thermal vacuum, acoustics, vibration, and shock testing to ensure the spacecraft is ready to perform in the harsh conditions of deep space.
In tandem with HALO’s outfitting at Northrop Grumman, the Power and Propulsion Element – a powerful solar electric propulsion system – is being assembled at Maxar Space Systems in Palo Alto, California. Solar electric propulsion uses energy collected from solar panels converted to electricity to create xenon ions, then accelerates them to more than 50,000 miles per hour to create thrust that propels the spacecraft.
The element’s central cylinder, which resembles a large barrel, is being attached to the propulsion tanks, and avionics shelves are being installed. The first of three 12-kilowatt thrusters has been delivered to NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland for acceptance testing before delivery to Maxar and integration with the Power and Propulsion Element later this year.
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Last Updated Apr 25, 2025 ContactLaura RochonLocationJohnson Space Center Related Terms
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
An astronaut glove designed for International Space Station spacewalks is prepped for testing in a chamber called CITADEL at NASA JPL. Conducted at temperatures as frigid as those Artemis III astronauts will see on the lunar South Pole, the testing supports next-generation spacesuit development.NASA/JPL-Caltech Engineers with NASA Johnson and the NASA Engineering and Safety Center ready an astronaut glove for insertion into the main CITADEL chamber at JPL. The team tested the glove in vacuum at minus 352 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 213 degrees Celsius).NASA/JPL-Caltech A JPL facility built to support potential robotic spacecraft missions to frozen ocean worlds helps engineers develop safety tests for next-generation spacesuits.
When NASA astronauts return to the Moon under the Artemis campaign and eventually venture farther into the solar system, they will encounter conditions harsher than any humans have experienced before. Ensuring next-generation spacesuits protect astronauts requires new varieties of tests, and a one-of-a-kind chamber called CITADEL (Cryogenic Ice Testing, Acquisition Development, and Excavation Laboratory) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California is helping.
Built to prepare potential robotic explorers for the frosty, low-pressure conditions on ocean worlds like Jupiter’s frozen moon Europa, CITADEL also can evaluate how spacesuit gloves and boots hold up in extraordinary cold. Spearheaded by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, a glove testing campaign in CITADEL ran from October 2023 to March 2024. Boot testing, initiated by the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, took place from October 2024 to January 2025.
An astronaut boot — part of a NASA lunar spacesuit prototype, the xEMU — is readied for testing in JPL’s CITADEL. A thick aluminum plate stands in for the cold surface of the lunar South Pole, where Artemis III astronauts will confront conditions more extreme than any humans have yet experienced.NASA/JPL-Caltech In coming months, the team will adapt CITADEL to test spacesuit elbow joints to evaluate suit fabrics for longevity on the Moon. They’ll incorporate abrasion testing and introduce a simulant for lunar regolith, the loose material that makes up the Moon’s surface, into the chamber for the first time.
“We’ve built space robots at JPL that have gone across the solar system and beyond,” said Danny Green, a mechanical engineer who led the boot testing for JPL. “It’s pretty special to also use our facilities in support of returning astronauts to the Moon.”
Astronauts on the Artemis III mission will explore the Moon’s South Pole, a region of much greater extremes than the equatorial landing sites visited by Apollo-era missions. They’ll spend up to two hours at a time inside craters that may contain ice deposits potentially important to sustaining long-term human presence on the Moon. Called permanently shadowed regions, these intriguing features rank among the coldest locations in the solar system, reaching as low as minus 414 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 248 degrees Celsius). The CITADEL chamber gets close to those temperatures.
Engineers from JPL and NASA Johnson set up a test of the xEMU boot inside CITADEL. Built to prepare potential robotic explorers for conditions on ocean worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa, the chamber offers unique capabilities that have made it useful for testing spacesuit parts.NASA/JPL-Caltech “We want to understand what the risk is to astronauts going into permanently shadowed regions, and gloves and boots are key because they make prolonged contact with cold surfaces and tools,” said Zach Fester, an engineer with the Advanced Suit Team at NASA Johnson and the technical lead for the boot testing.
Keeping Cool
Housed in the same building as JPL’s historic 10-Foot Space Simulator, the CITADEL chamber uses compressed helium to get as low as minus 370 F (minus 223 C) — lower than most cryogenic facilities, which largely rely on liquid nitrogen. At 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall and 5 feet (1.5 meters) in diameter, the chamber is big enough for a person to climb inside.
An engineer collects simulated lunar samples while wearing the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit spacesuit during testing at NASA Johnson in late 2023. Recent testing of existing NASA spacesuit designs in JPL’s CITADEL chamber will ultimately support de-velopment of next-generation suits being built by Axiom Space.Axiom Space More important, it features four load locks, drawer-like chambers through which test materials are inserted into the main chamber while maintaining a chilled vacuum state. The chamber can take several days to reach test conditions, and opening it to insert new test materials starts the process all over again. The load locks allowed engineers to make quick adjustments during boot and glove tests.
Cryocoolers chill the chamber, and aluminum blocks inside can simulate tools astronauts might grab or the cold lunar surface on which they’d walk. The chamber also features a robotic arm to interact with test materials, plus multiple visible-light and infrared cameras to record operations.
Testing Extremities
The gloves tested in the chamber are the sixth version of a glove NASA began using in the 1980s, part of a spacesuit design called the Extravehicular Mobility Unit. Optimized for spacewalks at the International Space Station, the suit is so intricate it’s essentially a personal spacecraft. Testing in CITADEL at minus 352 F (minus 213 C) showed the legacy glove would not meet thermal requirements in the more challenging environment of the lunar South Pole. Results haven’t yet been fully analyzed from boot testing, which used a lunar surface suit prototype called the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit. NASA’s reference design of an advanced suit architecture, this spacesuit features enhanced fit, mobility, and safety.
In addition to spotting vulnerabilities with existing suits, the CITADEL experiments will help NASA prepare criteria for standardized, repeatable, and inexpensive test methods for the next-generation lunar suit being built by Axiom Space — the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, which NASA astronauts will wear during the Artemis III mission.
“This test is looking to identify what the limits are: How long can that glove or boot be in that lunar environment?” said Shane McFarland, technology development lead for the Advanced Suit Team at NASA Johnson. “We want to quantify what our capability gap is for the current hardware so we can give that information to the Artemis suit vendor, and we also want to develop this unique test capability to assess future hardware designs.”
In the past, astronauts themselves have been part of thermal testing. For gloves, an astronaut inserted a gloved hand into a chilled “glove box,” grabbed a frigid object, and held it until their skin temperature dropped as low as 50 F (10 C). McFarland stressed that such human-in-the-loop testing remains essential to ensuring future spacesuit safety but doesn’t produce the consistent data the team is looking for with the CITADEL testing.
To obtain objective feedback, the CITADEL testing team used a custom-built manikin hand and foot. A system of fluid loops mimicked the flow of warm blood through the appendages, while dozens of temperature and heat flux sensors provided data from inside gloves and boots.
“By using CITADEL and modern manikin technology, we can test design iterations faster and at much lower cost than traditional human-in-the-loop testing,” said Morgan Abney, NASA technical fellow for Environmental Control and Life Support, who conceived the glove testing effort. “Now we can really push the envelope on next-generation suit designs and have confidence we understand the risks. We’re one step closer to landing astronauts back on the Moon.”
Through Artemis, NASA will send astronauts to explore the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.
Houston, We Have a Podcast: next-generation spacesuits Why NASA’s Perseverance rover carries spacesuit materials News Media Contact
Melissa Pamer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
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Last Updated Apr 24, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
The asteroid Donaldjohanson as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI). This is one of the most detailed images returned by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby. This image was taken at 1:51 p.m. EDT (17:51 UTC), April 20, 2025, near closest approach, from a range of approximately 660 miles (1,100 km). The spacecraft’s closest approach distance was 600 miles (960 km), but the image shown was taken approximately 40 seconds beforehand. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast.NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab NASA’s Lucy spacecraft took this image of the main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson during its flyby on April 20, 2025, showing the elongated contact binary (an object formed when two smaller bodies collide). This was Lucy’s second flyby in the spacecraft’s 12-year mission.
Launched on Oct. 16, 2021, Lucy is the first space mission sent to explore a diverse population of small bodies known as the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. These remnants of our early solar system are trapped on stable orbits associated with – but not close to – the giant planet Jupiter. Lucy will explore a record-breaking number of asteroids, flying by three asteroids in the solar system’s main asteroid belt, and by eight Trojan asteroids that share an orbit around the Sun with Jupiter. April 20, 2025 marked Lucy’s second flyby. The spacecraft’s next target is Trojan asteroid Eurybates and its satellite Queta in Aug. 2027.
Lucy is named for a fossilized skeleton of a prehuman ancestor. This flyby marked the first time NASA sent a spacecraft to a planetary body named after a living person. Asteroid Donaldjohanson was unnamed before becoming a target. The name Donaldjohanson was chosen in honor of the paleoanthropologist who discovered the Lucy fossil, Dr. Donald Johanson.
Learn more about Lucy’s flyby of asteroid Donaldjohanson.
Image credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Syncom Space Services employees Kenneth Shipman, left, and Jesse Yarbrough perform final tubing install in early March to prepare the interstage simulator gas system on the Thad Cochran Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center for leak checks. Leak checks were performed prior to activation of the gas system this month. The activation marks a milestone in preparation for future Green Run testing of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS) in the B-2 position of the Thad Cochran Test Stand.NASA/Danny Nowlin Syncom Space Services employees Branson Cuevas, left, Kenneth Shipman, and Jesse Yarbrough install final tubing in early March before activation of the interstage simulator gas systems on the Thad Cochran Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center. The activation marks a milestone in preparation for future Green Run testing of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS) in the B-2 position of the stand.NASA/Danny Nowlin Crews at NASA’s Stennis Space Center recently completed activation of interstage gas systems needed for testing a new SLS (Space Launch System) rocket stage to fly on future Artemis missions to the Moon and beyond.
The activation marks a milestone in preparation for future Green Run testing of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS) in the B-2 position of the Thad Cochran Test Stand. For Green Run, teams will activate and test all systems to ensure the stage is ready to fly. Green Run will culminate with a hot fire of the stage’s four RL10 engines, just as during an actual mission.
The interstage simulator component will function like the SLS interstage section that protects the upper stage during Artemis launches. The interstage simulator will do the same during Green Run testing of the stage at NASA Stennis.
The interstage simulator gas system will provide helium, nitrogen, and hydrogen to the four RL10 engines for all wet dress and hot fire exercises and tests.
During the activation process, NASA Stennis crews simulated the engines and flowed gases to mirror various conditions and collect data on pressures and temperatures. NASA Stennis teams conducted 80 different flow cases, calculating such items as flow rates, system pressure drop, and fill/vent times. The calculated parameters then were compared to models and analytics to certify the gas system meets performance requirements.
NASA engineers Chad Tournillon, left, and Robert Smith verify the functionality of the control system in early March for activation of the interstage simulator gas systems on the Thad Cochran Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center. The activation marks a milestone in preparation for future Green Run testing of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS) in the B-2 position of the stand.NASA/Danny Nowlin Members of the engineering and operations team review data as it is collected in early March during activation of the interstage simulator gas systems on the Thad Cochran Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center. Pictured are NASA’s Mark Robinson, Robert Simmers, Jack Conley, and Nick Nugent. Activation of the gas systems marks a milestone in preparation for future Green Run testing of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS) in the B-2 position of the Thad Cochran Test Stand.NASA/Danny Nowlin NASA engineers Pablo Gomez, left, and B.T. Wigley collect data in early March during activation of the interstage simulator gas systems on the Thad Cochran Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center. The activation marks a milestone in preparation for future Green Run testing of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS) in the B-2 position of the NASA Stennis stand.NASA/Danny Nowlin Syncom Space Services employees Brandon Fleming, Robert Sheaffer, and Logan Upton review paperwork in early March prior to activation of the interstage simulator gas systems on the Thad Cochran Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center. The activation marks a milestone in preparation for future Green Run testing of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS) in the B-2 position of the stand.NASA/Danny Nowlin Syncom Space Services engineering tech Brandon Fleming tightens a pressure transducer on the Thad Cochran Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in early March. Various transducers were used to provide data during subsequent activation of the interstage simulator gas systems at the stand. The activation marks a milestone in preparation for future Green Run testing of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS) in the B-2 position of the Thad Cochran Test Stand.NASA/Danny Nowlin Crews now will work to activate the umbilical gases and liquid oxygen systems. The NASA Stennis team will then conduct water system activation, where it will flow the flame deflector, aspirator, diffuser cooling circuits, purge rings and water-cooled fairing.
Afterward, the team will deploy the FireX system to check for total coverage, expected to be completed in the summer.
Before the exploration upper stage, built by Boeing at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, arrives at NASA Stennis, crews will perform a final 24-hour check, or stress test, across all test complex facilities to demonstrate readiness for the test series.
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By NASA
4 min read
NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Images Asteroid Donaldjohanson
In its second asteroid encounter, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft obtained a close look at a uniquely shaped fragment of an asteroid that formed about 150 million years ago. The spacecraft has begun returning images that were collected as it flew approximately 600 miles (960 km) from the asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025.
The asteroid Donaldjohanson as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) on NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby. This timelapse shows images captured approximately every 2 seconds beginning at 1:50 p.m. EDT (17:50 UTC), April 20, 2025. The asteroid rotates very slowly; its apparent rotation here is due to the spacecraft’s motion as it flies by Donaldjohanson at a distance of 1,000 to 660 miles (1,600 to 1,100 km). The spacecraft’s closest approach distance was 600 miles (960 km), but the images shown were taken approximately 40 seconds beforehand, the nearest ones at a distance of 660 miles (1100 km). NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL The asteroid was previously observed to have large brightness variations over a 10-day period, so some of Lucy team members’ expectations were confirmed when the first images showed what appeared to be an elongated contact binary (an object formed when two smaller bodies collide). However, the team was surprised by the odd shape of the narrow neck connecting the two lobes, which looks like two nested ice cream cones.
“Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology,” says Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. “As we study the complex structures in detail, they will reveal important information about the building blocks and collisional processes that formed the planets in our Solar System.”
From a preliminary analysis of the first available images collected by the spacecraft’s L’LORRI imager, the asteroid appears to be larger than originally estimated, about 5 miles (8 km) long and 2 miles (3.5 km) wide at the widest point. In this first set of high-resolution images returned from the spacecraft, the full asteroid is not visible as the asteroid is larger than the imager’s field of view. It will take up to a week for the team to downlink the remainder of the encounter data from the spacecraft; this dataset will give a more complete picture of the asteroid’s overall shape.
Like Lucy’s first asteroid flyby target, Dinkinesh, Donaldjohanson is not a primary science target of the Lucy mission. As planned, the Dinkinesh flyby was a system’s test for the mission, while this encounter was a full dress rehearsal, in which the team conducted a series of dense observations to maximize data collection. Data collected by Lucy’s other scientific instruments, the L’Ralph color imager and infrared spectrometer and the L’TES thermal infrared spectrometer, will be retrieved and analyzed over the next few weeks.
The Lucy spacecraft will spend most of the remainder of 2025 travelling through the main asteroid belt. Lucy will encounter the mission’s first main target, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid Eurybates, in August 2027.
“These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” said Tom Statler, program scientist for the Lucy mission at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.”
The asteroid Donaldjohanson as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI). This is one of the most detailed images returned by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby. This image was taken at 1:51 p.m. EDT (17:51 UTC), April 20, 2025, near closest approach, from a range of approximately 660 miles (1,100 km). The spacecraft’s closest approach distance was 600 miles (960 km), but the image shown was taken approximately 40 seconds beforehand. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast. NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering and the safety and mission assurance for Lucy, as well as the designing and building the L’Ralph instrument. Hal Levison of the Boulder, Colorado, office of SwRI is the principal investigator. SwRI is headquartered in San Antonio and also leads the mission’s science team, science observation planning, and data processing. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and the safety and mission assurance for Lucy, as well as the L’Ralph instrument. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft, designed the orbital trajectory, and provides flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are responsible for navigating the Lucy spacecraft. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed and built the L’LORRI (Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) instrument. Arizona State University designed and built the L’TES (Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer). Lucy is the thirteenth mission in NASA’s Discovery Program, which is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
By Katherine Kretke
Southwest Research Institute
Media Contact:
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Apr 21, 2025 Editor Jamie Adkins Contact Molly Wasser molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov Related Terms
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