Artemis II astronauts' lunar flyby data, including moon impact flashes, now public

By the Everything Space news desk · 08 Oct 2026 · written from the sources below

Image: Phys.org

The crew's handwritten notes and recorded observations from their trip around the moon reveal faint impact flashes and are now available for public and scientific study.

NASA has released the complete set of lunar science observations gathered by the Artemis II crew during their journey to the moon and back, making the data available to researchers and the public.

During the mission, which ran from April 1 to April 10, 2026, astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, documented their observations of the moon directly, including handwritten annotations on tablet images captured aboard the Orion spacecraft.

Among the observations, the crew reported seeing five extremely faint flashes of light on the lunar surface while Orion was about 46,000 miles from the moon. These brief bursts, described by the astronauts as pinprick-like, are believed to result from small rocky fragments striking the moon's surface.

The newly released data includes the annotated imagery as well as audio recordings of the crew's real-time observations, offering a first-hand record of what the astronauts saw during their lunar flyby.

By making this material public, NASA aims to allow the broader science community and interested members of the public to study the observations further, including the documented impact flashes and other lunar imagery captured during the mission.

Written in Everything Space’s own words by our news-desk model from the sources above, and checked against them in code: every number in this report appears in its sources, and no sentence is copied from them.