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By NASA
3 Min Read Inside NASA’s New Orion Mission Evaluation Room for Artemis II
As NASA’s Orion spacecraft is carrying crew around the Moon on the Artemis II mission, a team of expert engineers in the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will be meticulously monitoring the spacecraft along its journey. They’ll be operating from a new space in the mission control complex built to host the Orion Mission Evaluation Room (MER). Through the success of Orion and the Artemis missions, NASA will return humanity to the Moon and prepare to land an American on the surface of Mars.
Inside the Mission Evaluation Room, dozens of engineers will be monitoring the spacecraft and collecting data, while the flight control team located in mission control’s White Flight Control Room is simultaneously operating and sending commands to Orion during the flight. The flight control team will rely on the engineering expertise of the evaluation room to help with unexpected spacecraft behaviors that may arise during the mission and help analyze Orion’s performance data.
The new Orion Mission Evaluation Room inside the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.NASA/Rad Sinyak The Mission Evaluation Room team is made up of engineers from NASA, Lockheed Martin, ESA (European Space Agency), and Airbus who bring deep, expert knowledge of the spacecraft’s subsystems and functions to the mission. These functions are represented across 24 consoles, usually staffed by two engineers in their respective discipline, often hosting additional support personnel during planned dynamic phases of the mission or test objectives.
“The operations team is flying the spacecraft, but they are relying on the Mission Evaluation Room’s reachback engineering capability from the NASA, industry, and international Orion team that has designed, built, and tested this spacecraft.”
Trey PerrymAn
Lead for Orion Mission and Integration Systems at NASA Johnson
Perryman guides the Artemis II Orion mission evaluation room alongside Jen Madsen, deputy manager for Orion’s Avionics, Power, and Software.
With crew aboard, Orion will put more systems to the test, requiring more expertise to monitor new systems not previously flown. To support these needs, and safe, successful flights of Orion to the Moon, NASA officially opened the all-new facility in mission control to host the Orion Mission Evaluation Room on Aug. 15.
The Orion Mission Evaluation Room team works during an Artemis II mission simulation on Aug. 19, 2025, from the new space inside the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.NASA/Rad Sinyak During Artemis II, the evaluation room will operate in three daily shifts, beginning about 48 hours prior to liftoff. The room is staffed around the clock throughout the nearly 10 day mission, up until the spacecraft has been safely secured inside the U.S. Navy ship that will recover it after splashdown.
Another key function of the evaluation room is collecting and analyzing the large amount of data Orion will produce during the flight, which will help inform the room’s team on the spacecraft’s performance.
“Data collection is hugely significant,” Perryman said. “We’ll do an analysis and assessment of all the data we’ve collected, and compare it against what we were expecting from the spacecraft. While a lot of that data comparison will take place during the mission, we’ll also do deeper analysis after the mission is over to see what we learned.”
The Orion Mission Evaluation Room team works during an Artemis II mission simulation on Aug. 19, 2025, from the new space inside the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.NASA/Rad Sinyak If unplanned situations arise during the mission, the Mission Evaluation Room has additional layers of ability to support any specific need that presents itself. This includes various engineering support from different NASA centers, Lockheed Martin’s Integrated Test Lab, ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Center, and more.
“It’s been amazing to have helped design and build Orion from the beginning – and now, we’ll be able to see the culmination of all those years of work in this new Mission Evaluation Room."
Jen Madsen
Deputy Manager for Orion’s Avionics, Power, and Software
“We’ll see our spacecraft carrying our crew to the Moon on these screens and still be continuously learning about all of its capabilities,” said Madsen.
The Artemis II test flight will send NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen around the Moon and return them safely back home. This first crewed flight under NASA’s Artemis campaign will set the stage for NASA to return Americans to the lunar surface and help the agency and its commercial and international partners prepare for future human missions to Mars.
The Orion Mission Evaluation Room Team gathers for a group photo on Aug. 18, 2025.NASA/Josh Valcarcel Share
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Last Updated Aug 26, 2025 Related Terms
Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle Artemis Artemis 2 Johnson Space Center Johnson's Mission Control Center Orion Program Explore More
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By USH
The first video, beginning around the 1:02 mark, was captured on a dash cam while driving eastbound on a four-lane freeway. Suddenly, a large triangular craft entered the frame, flying approximately 300 to 400 feet above the road.
Although the exact location remains unknown, the sighting is remarkable for its level of visible detail:
A blinking light with two dull orange lights in the center. A large circular feature on the underside, possibly an energy source. A distinctly aerodynamic triangular design. What appears to be an energy field or interference surrounding the craft. An estimated width of 75 to 100 feet, with no audible sound, suggesting non-conventional technology.
When viewed in slow motion, the footage stands out as one of the most striking nighttime captures to date, raising the question: is this a black-budget military project, or evidence of something extraterrestrial? Interestingly, the triangular craft bears a strong resemblance to the rumored TR-3B black manta, an alleged anti-gravity alien reproduction vehicle.
Additional almost similar sightings in Texas and Florida.
Austin, Texas: A dark craft hovering silently in the night sky, completely stationary throughout the entire recording. Sarasota, Florida: Three energy sources forming a triangular pattern while hovering in the night sky. It looks like it could be one of those triangle crafts.
Today, many aerial craft, whether human-made or not, are observed using technologies that remain beyond our current understanding.
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Dwarf planet Ceres is shown in these enhanced-color renderings that use images from NASA’s Dawn mission. New thermal and chemicals models that rely on the mission’s data indicate Ceres may have long ago had conditions suitable for life.NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA The dwarf planet is cold now, but new research paints a picture of Ceres hosting a deep, long-lived energy source that may have maintained habitable conditions in the past.
New NASA research has found that Ceres may have had a lasting source of chemical energy: the right types of molecules needed to fuel some microbial metabolisms. Although there is no evidence that microorganisms ever existed on Ceres, the finding supports theories that this intriguing dwarf planet, which is the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may have once had conditions suitable to support single-celled lifeforms.
Science data from NASA’s Dawn mission, which ended in 2018, previously showed that the bright, reflective regions on Ceres’ surface are mostly made of salts left over from liquid that percolated up from underground. Later analysis in 2020 found that the source of this liquid was an enormous reservoir of brine, or salty water, below the surface. In other research, the Dawn mission also revealed evidence that Ceres has organic material in the form of carbon molecules — essential, though not sufficient on its own, to support microbial cells.
The presence of water and carbon molecules are two critical pieces of the habitability puzzle on Ceres. The new findings offer the third: a long-lasting source of chemical energy in Ceres’ ancient past that could have made it possible for microorganisms to survive. This result does not mean that Ceres had life, but rather, that there likely was “food” available should life have ever arisen on Ceres.
This illustration depicts the interior of dwarf planet Ceres, including the transfer of water and gases from the rocky core to a reservoir of salty water. Carbon dioxide and methane are among the molecules carrying chemical energy beneath Ceres’ surface.NASA/JPL-Caltech In the study, published in Science Advances on Aug. 20, the authors built thermal and chemical models mimicking the temperature and composition of Ceres’ interior over time. They found that 2.5 billion years or so ago, Ceres’ subsurface ocean may have had a steady supply of hot water containing dissolved gases traveling up from metamorphosed rocks in the rocky core. The heat came from the decay of radioactive elements within the dwarf planet’s rocky interior that occurred when Ceres was young — an internal process thought to be common in our solar system.
“On Earth, when hot water from deep underground mixes with the ocean, the result is often a buffet for microbes — a feast of chemical energy. So it could have big implications if we could determine whether Ceres’ ocean had an influx of hydrothermal fluid in the past,” said Sam Courville, lead author of the study. Now based at Arizona State University in Tempe, he led the research while working as an intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which also managed the Dawn mission.
Catching Chill
The Ceres we know today is unlikely to be habitable. It is cooler, with more ice and less water than in the past. There is currently insufficient heat from radioactive decay within Ceres to keep the water from freezing, and what liquid remains has become a concentrated brine.
The period when Ceres would most likely have been habitable was between a half-billion and 2 billion years after it formed (or about 2.5 billion to 4 billion years ago), when its rocky core reached its peak temperature. That’s when warm fluids would have been introduced into Ceres’ underground water.
The dwarf planet also doesn’t have the benefit of present-day internal heating generated by the push and pull of orbiting a large planet, like Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa do. So Ceres’ greatest potential for habitability-fueling energy was in the past.
This result has implications for water-rich objects throughout the outer solar system, too. Many of the other icy moons and dwarf planets that are of similar size to Ceres (about 585 miles, or 940 kilometers, in diameter) and don’t have significant internal heating from the gravitational pull of planets could have also had a period of habitability in their past.
More About Dawn
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL managed Dawn’s mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn was a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. JPL was responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Northrop Grumman in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute were international partners on the mission team.
For a complete list of mission participants, visit:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/dawn/overview/
News Media Contacts
Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-287-4115
gretchen.p.mccartney@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
2025-108
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Last Updated Aug 20, 2025 Related Terms
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By USH
NASA’s 1991 Discovery shuttle video shows UFOs making impossible maneuvers, evading a possible Star Wars railgun test. Evidence of secret tech?
In September 1991, NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery transmitted live video that has since become one of the most debated UFO clips ever recorded. The footage, later analyzed by independent researchers, shows glowing objects in orbit performing maneuvers far beyond the limits of known physics.
One object appears over Earth’s horizon, drifts smoothly, then suddenly reacts to a flash of light by accelerating at impossible speeds, estimated at over 200,000 mph while withstanding forces of 14,000 g’s. NASA officially dismissed the anomalies as ice particles or debris, but side by side comparisons with actual orbital ice show key differences: the objects make sharp turns, sudden accelerations, and fade in brightness in ways consistent with being hundreds of miles away, not near the shuttle.
Image analysis expert Dr. Mark Carlotto confirmed that at least one object was located about 1,700 miles from the shuttle, placing it in Earth’s atmosphere. At that distance, the object would be too large and too fast to be dismissed as ice or space junk.
The flash and two streaks seen in the video resemble the Pentagon’s “Brilliant Pebbles” concept, a railgun based missile defense system tested in the early 1990s. Researchers suggest the shuttle cameras may have accidentally, or deliberately, captured a live Star Wars weapons test in orbit.
The UFO easily evaded the attack, leading some to conclude that it was powered by a form of hyperdimensional technology capable of altering gravity.
Notably, following this 1991 incident, all subsequent NASA shuttle external camera feeds were censored or delayed, raising speculation that someone inside the agency allowed the extraordinary footage to slip out.
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By NASA
NASA/Mike Fincke Eleven International Space Station crew members gather inside the space station’s Unity module for a portrait on Aug. 3, 2025. In the front row, from left are, Kimiya Yui of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Zena Cardman of NASA, Oleg Platonov of Roscosmos, and Mike Fincke of NASA. In the second row are, Nichole Ayers of NASA, Sergey Ryzhikov of Roscosmos, and Anne McClain of NASA. In the back are, Takuya Onishi of JAXA, Kirill Peskov of Roscosmos, Jonny Kim of NASA, and Alexey Zubritsky of Roscosmos.
Ayers, McClain, Onishi, and Peskov recently returned to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on Aug. 9, 2025.
Keep up with daily activity aboard the orbital laboratory.
Image credit: NASA/Mike Fincke
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