Artemis II: Sending Humans Beyond the Magnetosphere

  • Released Thursday, March 5, 2026
  • Last updated Thursday, March 5, 2026 at 6:05 PM EST
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The Moon sits more than 200,000 miles away from Earth—quite a journey compared to satellites like the International Space Station, which orbit just 254 miles above us. When the Artemis II crew launches toward the Moon, they'll become the first humans to travel that far from our home planet since the Apollo 17 mission back in 1972.

Artemis II will be the first time in over 50 years that humans venture beyond Earth's protective magnetic shield, called the magnetosphere. This visualization captures the spacecraft's journey as the Orion spacecraft leaves the safety of the magnetosphere (shown here in green) and travels into open space, where it will encounter the solar wind streaming from the Sun.

Artemis II will be the first time in over 50 years that humans venture beyond Earth's protective magnetic shield.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Missions

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Datasets used

  • GAMERA (Grid Agnostic MHD for Extended Research Applications)

    ID: 1201
    Type: Model Collected by: The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory LLC

    GAMERA is a new magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation tool building and improving upon the high-heritage Lyon-Fedder-Mobarry (LFM) code. GAMERA has been written completely from scratch in modern Fortran and provides a flexible, portable, and exascale-capable MHD code. GAMERA features multiple improvements over LFM including: minimal external library dependence, high degree of optimization, OpenMP parallelism allowing use of heterogeneous architectures, and multiple numerics upgrades. Thus, while preserving all key numerical algorithms underlying the LFM code, GAMERA provides a robust and user-friendly solution for sustainable future.

    Credit: References

    This dataset can be found at: https://cgs.jhuapl.edu/Models/gamera.php

    See all pages that use this dataset

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This page was originally published on Thursday, March 5, 2026.
This page was last updated on Thursday, March 5, 2026 at 6:05 PM EST.