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By NASA
On May 22, 2025, NASA hosted an Expedition 72 crew debrief and awards ceremony at Space Center Houston, where more than 1,000 attendees gathered to celebrate. The event recognized the achievements of the crew as well as NASA employees and partners whose dedication and support contributed to the expedition’s success. Crew members from Expedition 72 shared reflections and anecdotes from their time on the International Space Station and expressed gratitude for the opportunity to contribute to scientific research aboard the orbiting laboratory.
A group photo of participants from the Expedition 72 crew debrief and awards ceremony on May 22, 2025, at Space Center Houston’s IMAX theater. NASA/James Blair The event included four NASA astronauts:
Nick Hague, Crew-9 commander and Expedition 72 flight engineer Butch Wilmore, Boeing Starliner commander and Expedition 72 flight engineer Suni Williams, Boeing Starliner pilot and Expedition 72 commander Don Pettit, Soyuz MS-26 and Expedition 72 flight engineer The Expedition 72 crew also included Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov, Aleksey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner, who were not in attendance. The cosmonauts served as Crew-9 mission specialist, Soyuz-MS commander, and Soyuz-MS flight engineer, respectively.
NASA astronaut Matt Dominick kicked off the event by striking the ceremonial bell, a tradition symbolizing the end of the mission for the crew and those that support them.
Johnson Space Center Acting Director Stephen Koerner recognized the crew’s commitment to the mission and their role in the advancement of human spaceflight. “These brave men and women make the tough yet rewarding choice to embark on long-duration missions away from their family and friends,” he said. “They do this to conduct groundbreaking research and inspire generations. Spaceflight is hard, but through togetherness we make giant leaps, going further than ever before.”
NASA astronauts (from left) Don Pettit and Butch Wilmore, Expedition 72 flight engineers, pack external research hardware which housed a variety of samples exposed to the vacuum of space such as polymers, photovoltaic devices, and more. The samples were returned to Earth to be examined to understand how space radiation, the extreme thermal environment, micrometeoroids, and more affect materials possibly benefitting the space industry. NASA NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Suni Williams, Expedition 72 Flight Engineer and Commander respectively, discuss orbital lab maintenance procedures aboard the International Space Station.NASA The Expedition 72 crew dedicated more than 1,000 combined hours to scientific research and technology demonstrations aboard the International Space Station. Their work included enhancing metal 3D printing capabilities in orbit, exploring the potential of stem cell technology for treating diseases, preparing the first wooden satellite for deployment, and collecting samples from the station’s exterior to examine whether microorganisms can survive in the harsh environment of space. They also conducted studies on plant growth and quality, investigated how fire behaves in microgravity, and advanced life support systems, all aimed at improving the health, safety, and sustainability of future space missions.
Pettit also used his spare time and surroundings aboard the station to conduct unique experiments and captivate the public with his photography. Expedition 72 captured a record 1 million photos during the mission, showcasing the unique research and views aboard the orbiting laboratory through astronauts’ eyes.
The expedition was a historic venture, with Williams and Wilmore launching aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft as part of NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test before being integrated with the Expedition 71/72 crew and returning on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9. While working aboard the orbiting laboratory, Williams established a new record for the most cumulative spacewalking time by a woman — 62 hours and 6 minutes — placing her fourth among the most experienced spacewalkers in history. Additionally, Expedition 72 saw the first reboost of the International Space Station by a Dragon spacecraft.
The crew participated in a panel discussion, sharing further details about the expedition including experiments conducted, favorite foods, and experiencing the Aurora Borealis. The conversation closed with a special patch presentation from Wilmore to Williams to highlight her achievement of exceeding Mach 25 in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.
Following the panel, an award ceremony recognized team members for their efforts in supporting the mission, with recipients including the crew, NASA employees, and commercial partners.
The Expedition 72 crew poses for a portrait inside the International Space Station’s Harmony module with a cake commemorating a total of 3,000 cumulative days in space gained between the individual crew members. Front row (from left): Roscosmos cosmonaut Ivan Vagner, NASA astronaut Nick Hague, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Back row (from left): NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Don Pettit, Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, and NASA astronaut Suni Williams.NASA Flight Operations Directorate Acting Director Kjell Lindgren discussed the impact of collaboration with commercial and international partners. “Your collaboration is vital not just to mission success but to the very identity of this program,” he said. “Together, we can demonstrate what global collaboration can achieve in pursuit of excellence and exploration.”
Watch below to recap the Expedition 72 crew members’ journey aboard the International Space Station and to celebrate those who helped make the mission a success.
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Advancing new hazard detection and precision landing technologies to help future space missions successfully achieve safe and soft landings is a critical area of space research and development, particularly for future crewed missions. To support this, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) is pursuing a regular cadence of flight testing on a variety of vehicles, helping researchers rapidly advance these critical systems for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
“These flight tests directly address some of NASA’s highest-ranked technology needs, or shortfalls, ranging from advanced guidance algorithms and terrain-relative navigation to lidar-and optical-based hazard detection and mapping,” said Dr. John M. Carson III, STMD technical integration manager for precision landing and based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Since the beginning of this year, STMD has supported flight testing of four precision landing and hazard detection technologies from many sectors, including NASA, universities, and commercial industry. These cutting-edge solutions have flown aboard a suborbital rocket system, a high-speed jet, a helicopter, and a rocket-powered lander testbed. That’s four precision landing technologies tested on four different flight vehicles in four months.
“By flight testing these technologies on Earth in spaceflight-relevant trajectories and velocities, we’re demonstrating their capabilities and validating them with real data for transitioning technologies from the lab into mission applications,” said Dr. Carson. “This work also signals to industry and other partners that these capabilities are ready to push beyond NASA and academia and into the next generation of Moon and Mars landers.”
The following NASA-supported flight tests took place between February and May:
Suborbital Rocket Test of Vision-Based Navigation System
Identifying landmarks to calculate accurate navigation solutions is a key function of Draper’s Multi-Environment Navigator (DMEN), a vision-based navigation and hazard detection technology designed to improve safety and precision of lunar landings.
Aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard reusable suborbital rocket system, DMEN collected real-world data and validated its algorithms to advance it for use during the delivery of three NASA payloads as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. On Feb. 4, DMEN performed the latest in a series of tests supported by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, which is managed at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.
During the February flight, which enabled testing at rocket speeds on ascent and descent, DMEN scanned the Earth below, identifying landmarks to calculate an accurate navigation solution. The technology achieved accuracy levels that helped Draper advance it for use in terrain-relative navigation, which is a key element of landing on other planets.
New Shepard booster lands during the flight test on February 4, 2025.Blue Origin High-Speed Jet Tests of Lidar-Based Navigation
Several highly dynamic maneuvers and flight paths put Psionic’s Space Navigation Doppler Lidar (PSNDL) to the test while it collected navigation data at various altitudes, velocities, and orientations.
Psionic licensed NASA’s Navigation Doppler Lidar technology developed at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and created its own miniaturized system with improved functionality and component redundancies, making it more rugged for spaceflight. In February, PSNDL along with a full navigation sensor suite was mounted aboard an F/A-18 Hornet aircraft and underwent flight testing at NASA Armstrong.
The aircraft followed a variety of flight paths over several days, including a large figure-eight loop and several highly dynamic maneuvers over Death Valley, California. During these flights, PSNDL collected navigation data relevant for lunar and Mars entry and descent.
The high-speed flight tests demonstrated the sensor’s accuracy and navigation precision in challenging conditions, helping prepare the technology to land robots and astronauts on the Moon and Mars. These recent tests complemented previous Flight Opportunities-supported testing aboard a lander testbed to advance earlier versions of their PSNDL prototypes.
The Psionic Space Navigation Doppler Lidar (PSNDL) system is installed in a pod located under the right wing of a NASA F/A-18 research aircraft for flight testing above Death Valley near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, in February 2025.NASA Helicopter Tests of Real-Time Mapping Lidar
Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, developed a state-of-the-art Hazard Detection Lidar (HDL) sensor system to quickly map the surface from a vehicle descending at high speed to find safe landing sites in challenging locations, such as Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons), our own Moon, Mars, and other planetary bodies throughout the solar system. The HDL-scanning lidar generates three-dimensional digital elevation maps in real time, processing approximately 15 million laser measurements and mapping two football fields’ worth of terrain in only two seconds.
In mid-March, researchers tested the HDL from a helicopter at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with flights over a lunar-like test field with rocks and craters. The HDL collected numerous scans from several different altitudes and view angles to simulate a range of landing scenarios, generating real-time maps. Preliminary reviews of the data show excellent performance of the HDL system.
The HDL is a component of NASA’s Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) technology suite. The SPLICE descent and landing system integrates multiple component technologies, such as avionics, sensors, and algorithms, to enable landing in hard-to-reach areas of high scientific interest. The HDL team is also continuing to test and further improve the sensor for future flight opportunities and commercial applications.
NASA’s Hazard Detection Lidar field test team at Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida in March 2025. Lander Tests of Powered-Descent Guidance Software
Providing pinpoint landing guidance capability with minimum propellant usage, the San Diego State University (SDSU) powered-descent guidance algorithms seek to improve autonomous spacecraft precision landing and hazard avoidance. During a series of flight tests in April and May, supported by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, the university’s software was integrated into Astrobotic’s Xodiac suborbital rocket-powered lander via hardware developed by Falcon ExoDynamics as part of NASA TechLeap Prize’s Nighttime Precision Landing Challenge.
The SDSU algorithms aim to improve landing capabilities by expanding the flexibility and trajectory-shaping ability and enhancing the propellant efficiency of powered-descent guidance systems. They have the potential for infusion into human and robotic missions to the Moon as well as high-mass Mars missions.
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As part of a series of tethered and free-flight tests in April and May 2025, algorithms developed by San Diego State University guided the descent of the Xodiac lander testbed vehicle.Astrobotic By advancing these and other important navigation, precision landing, and hazard detection technologies with frequent flight tests, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate is prioritizing safe and successful touchdowns in challenging planetary environments for future space missions.
Learn more: https://www.nasa.gov/space-technology-mission-directorate/
By: Lee Ann Obringer
NASA’s Flight Opportunities program
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Boeing’s test plane simulates digital taxiing at Moffett Field at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete New technology tested by an industry partner at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley could improve how commercial planes taxi to and from gates to runways, making operations safer and more efficient on the surfaces of airports.
Airport taxiways are busy. Planes come and go while support vehicles provide maintenance, carry fuel, transport luggage, and more. Pilots must listen carefully to air traffic control when getting directions to the runway – and garbled communications and heavy workloads can cause issues that could lead to runway incursions or collisions.
Researchers at Boeing are working to address these issues by digitizing taxiway information and automating aircraft taxi functions. The team traveled to NASA Ames to collaborate with researchers while testing their technology at the Moffett Federal Airfield and NASA’s FutureFlight Central, an air traffic control simulation facility.
Doug Christensen, test engineer for Air Traffic Management eXploration (ATM-X) at NASA Ames, and Mike Klein, autonomy technical leader in product development at Boeing discuss the digital taxi test in Ames’s FutureFlight Central facility.NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete To test these new technologies, Boeing brought a custom single-engine test plane to the airfield. Working from FutureFlight Central, their researchers developed simulated taxiway instructions and deployed them to the test pilot’s digital tablet and the autonomous system.
Typically, taxiing requires verbal communication between an air traffic controller and a pilot. Boeing’s digital taxi release system displays visual turn-by-turn routes and directions directly on the pilot’s digital tablet.
“This project with Boeing lends credibility to the research being done across Ames,” said Adam Yingling, autonomy researcher for the Air Traffic Management-eXploration (ATM-X) program at NASA Ames. “We have a unique capability with our proximity to Moffett and the work Ames researchers are doing to advance air traffic capabilities and technologies to support the future of our national airspace that opens the door to work alongside commercial operators like Boeing.”
The team’s autonomous taxiing tests allowed its aircraft to follow the air traffic control’s digital instructions to transit to the runway without additional pilot inputs.
Estela Buchmann, David Shapiro, and Maxim Mounier, members of the NASA Ames ATM-X project team, analyze results of Boeing’s digital taxi test at Ames’s FutureFlight Central facility.NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete As commercial air travel increases and airspace gets busier, pilots and air traffic controllers have to manage heavier workloads. NASA is working with commercial partners to address those challenges through initiatives like its Air Traffic Management-eXploration project, which aims to transform air traffic management to accommodate new vehicles and air transportation options.
“In order to increase the safety and efficiency of our airspace operations, NASA research in collaboration with industry can demonstrate how specific functions can be automated to chart the course for enhancing traffic management on the airport surface,” said Shivanjli Sharma, ATM-X project manager at Ames.
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By NASA
Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 captured an image March 6, 2025, after landing in a crater from the Moon’s South Pole. The lunar lander is on its side near the intended landing site, Mons Mouton. In the center of the image between the two lander legs is the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 suite, which shows the drill deployed.Intuitive Machines NASA’s PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1) mission was designed to demonstrate technologies to help scientists better understand lunar resources ahead of crewed Artemis missions to the Moon. During the short-lived mission on the Moon, the performance of PRIME-1’s technology gave NASA teams reason to celebrate.
“The PRIME-1 mission proved that our hardware works in the harshest environment we’ve ever tested it in,” said Janine Captain, PRIME-1 co-principal investigator and research chemist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “While it may not have gone exactly to plan, this is a huge step forward as we prepare to send astronauts back to the Moon and build a sustainable future there.”
Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission launched to the Moon on Feb. 26, 2025, from NASA Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39A, as part of the company’s second Moon delivery for NASA under the agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign. The IM-2 Nova-C lunar lander, named Athena, carried PRIME-1 and its suite of two instruments: a drill known as TRIDENT (The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain), designed to bring lunar soil to the surface; and a mass spectrometer, Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSOLO), to study TRIDENT’s drill cuttings for the presence of gases that could one day help provide propellant or breathable oxygen to future Artemis explorers.
The IM-2 mission touched down on the lunar surface on March 6, just around 1,300 feet (400 meters) from its intended landing site of Mons Mouton, a lunar plateau near the Moon’s South Pole. The Athena lander was resting on its side inside a crater preventing it from recharging its solar cells, resulting in an end of the mission.
“We were supposed to have 10 days of operation on the Moon, and what we got was closer to 10 hours,” said Julie Kleinhenz, NASA’s lead systems engineer for PRIME-1, as well as the in-situ resource utilization system capability lead deputy for the agency. “It was 10 hours more than most people get so I am thrilled to have been a part of it.”
Kleinhenz has spent nearly 20 years working on how to use lunar resources for sustained operations. In-situ resource utilization harnesses local natural resources at mission destinations. This enables fewer launches and resupply missions and significantly reduces the mass, cost, and risk of space exploration. With NASA poised to send humans back to the Moon and on to Mars, generating products for life support, propellants, construction, and energy from local materials will become increasingly important to future mission success.
“In-situ resource utilization is the key to unlocking long-term exploration, and PRIME-1 is helping us lay this foundation for future travelers.” Captain said.
The PRIME-1 technology also set out to answer questions about the properties of lunar regolith, such as soil strength. This data could help inform the design of in-situ resource utilization systems that would use local resources to create everything from landing pads to rocket fuel during Artemis and later missions.
“Once we got to the lunar surface, TRIDENT and MSOLO both started right up, and performed perfectly. From a technology demonstrations standpoint, 100% of the instruments worked.” Kleinhenz said.
The lightweight, low-power augering drill built by Honeybee Robotics, known as TRIDENT, is 1 meter long and features rotary and percussive actuators that convert energy into the force needed to drill. The drill was designed to stop at any depth as commanded from the ground and deposit its sample on the surface for analysis by MSOLO, a commercial off-the-shelf mass spectrometer modified by engineers and technicians at NASA Kennedy to withstand the harsh lunar environment. Designed to measure the composition of gases in the vicinity of the lunar lander, both from the lander and from the ambient exosphere, MSOLO can help NASA analyze the chemical makeup of the lunar soil and study water on the surface of the Moon.
Once on the Moon, the actuators on the drill performed as designed, completing multiple stages of movement necessary to drill into the lunar surface. Prompted by commands from technicians on Earth, the auger rotated, the drill extended to its full range, the percussion system performed a hammering motion, and the PRIME-1 team turned on an embedded core heater in the drill and used internal thermal sensors to monitor the temperature change.
While MSOLO was able to perform several scans to detect gases, researchers believe from the initial data that the gases detected were all anthropogenic, or human in origin, such as gases vented from spacecraft propellants and traces of Earth water. Data from PRIME-1 accounted for some of the approximately 7.5 gigabytes of data collected during the IM-2 mission, and researchers will continue to analyze the data in the coming months and publish the results.
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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.
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