Big smiles from Christina and Victor on the deck of the USS John P. Murtha, as they waited to be escorted for their routine post-mission medical checks.

The Artemis II mission ended in a dramatic fashion on April 10, 2026, when NASA's Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of San Diego, closing out humanity's first crewed journey to the moon in over 50 years.

The four-person crew — consisting of commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — returned to Earth after a 10-day mission that tested the systems NASA plans to use for future lunar expeditions. NASA said the splashdown occurred at 8:07 p.m. EDT or 5:07 PST, with recovery operations led by the US Navy's USS John P. Murtha.

An extreme homecoming
Re-entry tends to be one of the more dramatic and dangerous parts of a mission, especially for Artemis II.

Unlike return missions from the International Space Station, which begin in low Earth orbit and thus don't need nearly as much speed to return to Earth, Artemis II flew back into Earth's atmosphere from the moon at near-record-breaking speeds. Orion came back at roughly 24,600 mph (39,600 kmh), around 24 times the speed of a bullet. That faster speed meant that the capsule's heat shield endured around twice the amount of heat as a spacecraft coming back from the ISS.

The Artemis II crew is back on Earth. The science is just getting started 🚀

Here in Houston, teams of scientists have already started digging into the data that the Artemis II crew has collected. What they learn from this process will shape the next missions to the Moon.
NASA is preparing to send astronauts on increasingly difficult journeys, exploring more of the Moon and laying the groundwork required to go even further.

Future missions will land astronauts in the lunar South Pole region for the first time. They'll investigate the landscapes around their landing sites and deploy science instruments on the lunar surface. Generations of scientists will analyze the samples they bring home.

The data that future explorers collect about moonquakes, buried water ice, and the effects of radiation on plants and space crops will inform our future beyond Earth. Know before you go. Survive and thrive. Return safely. That’s NASA exploration science.

📷 Info: This shot is intentionally overexposed. For scientific analysis, the lunar science team requested multiple images of the same scene with different exposure settings—including overexposed, underexposed, & standard. Each highlights different aspects of the surface.

Let's run that back. One more time... Or two?
Our crew is now safely back on Earth. Relive the historic mission, and keep an eye on our website as more images and videos keep rolling in. go.nasa.gov/3OhVQph

"It's a special thing to be a human and it's a special thing to be on planet Earth."

Remarks from Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman upon arriving to NASA Johnson.

"Planet Earth: You. Are. A. Crew."

Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch reflects on what it means to be a "crew."

"We are a mirror, reflecting you."

Artemis II mission specialist Jeremy Hansen discusses ways that the crew worked together and supported each other throughout their lunar mission.

"We are fortunate to be in this agency at this time together."

Artemis II pilot Victor Glover expresses gratitude for everyone who supported him throughout his lunar mission.

Is your houseplant thirsty? Are crops getting enough water? Is a forest at high risk of wildfire? Leaf health can answer all these questions, and researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed new technology to measure hydration levels with greater accuracy and without hurting the plant. The researchers developed an electronic tattoo for leaves that uses the hyperflexible and sustainable material graphene to track hydration levels. It sticks on the leaves without harming them, a major improvement over current methods that work only with dead or dried-out leaves or provide indirect measurements.

"Being able to directly measure and monitor the live leaf over time, at the point of photosynthesis, gives us more information to understand the health of our plant ecosystems, whether that's an individual plant or an entire forest," said Jean Anne Incorvia, associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the leaders on the new research published recently in Nano Letters.

Artemis II Moon mission complete!
✅✅✅✅✅✅

- Space Launch System rocket launched crew into space
- Orion spacecraft kept astronauts safe
- Flew around the Moon, observed its far side
- New human spaceflight distance record
- Crew safely returned to Earth
- Inspired the WORLD

In a demonstration that could help pave the way for gene therapies with fewer side effects, several human cell types have been genetically modified with protein nanoparticles designed at University of Michigan Engineering and Michigan Medicine. Gene therapy has been enormously successful for treating disorders of the blood, including sickle cell disease and leukemia. However, using a virus as a vector for treatment can create unwanted side effects, such as secondary cancers and immune system overreactions. With the nanoparticles, the research team aims to develop a safer method for delivering gene therapies.

In a proof-of-concept experiment, the researchers used nanoparticles to modify several types of human cells. They made human liver cancer cells, kidney cells and immune cells glow green by giving them genes for green fluorescent protein. The cells activated the new genes after they engulfed and digested the nanoparticles, releasing the DNA or messenger RNA packed inside. The work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

"There are a lot of diseases where a protein is missing or dysfunctional due to a single mutation, and we can definitely correct for that by introducing a new gene," said Joerg Lahann, the Wolfgang Pauli Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering, director of the U-M Biointerfaces Institute and the corresponding author of the study.

"Typically, this is done with viruses, but the viruses can be toxic and activate the immune cells. So there has been a push in the field to replace virus-based gene editing strategies."

When lasers were invented in the 1960s, they opened new avenues for scientific discovery and everyday applications, from scanners at the grocery store to corrective eye surgery. Conventional lasers control photons—individual particles of light—but over the past 20 years, scientists have invented lasers that control other fundamental particles, including phonons—individual particles of vibration or sound. Controlling phonons could open even more possibilities with lasers, such as taking advantage of unique quantum properties like entanglement.

A new squeezed phonon laser developed by researchers at the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology provides precise control over phonons at the nanoscale level. This could give new insights into the nature of gravity, particle acceleration, and quantum physics.

In a paper in Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they coax these individual particles of mechanical motion to behave like a laser.

Nick Vamivakas, the Marie C. Wilson and Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Optical Physics with the URochester Institute of Optics, and his collaborators first demonstrated a phonon laser by trapping and levitating phonons with an optical tweezer in a vacuum in 2019. But to make this technology useful for extremely accurate measurements, they had to overcome a key obstacle fundamental to both photon and phonon lasers: noise, or unwanted disturbances that make a signal difficult to accurately read.

Researchers led by Botond Roska at the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel (IOB), along with an international team, have uncovered genetic pathways and chemical compounds that can help protect cone photoreceptors. These cells are damaged in diseases such as age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of vision loss.

Why Cone Cells Matter for Sight
Cone photoreceptors are located in the macula and play a crucial role in everyday vision tasks like reading, recognizing faces, and seeing color. When these cells die, as they do in many inherited retinal disorders and macular degeneration, central vision begins to fade. Despite years of research, there are still no approved treatments that can stop this process. This study, led by first authors Stefan Spirig, Alvaro Herrero Navarro, and colleagues, tackles that challenge using a human-based experimental model.

The burst of animal diversification spanning the transition from the Ediacaran to the Cambrian periods stands as one of the most consequential turning points in Earth’s history.

Yet the fossil record offers only a fragmented view of that transformation: Ediacaran communities bear little resemblance to those of the Cambrian, leaving the pivotal moment when major animal groups emerged frustratingly out of reach.

“Our discovery closes a major gap in the earliest phases of animal diversification,” said Dr. Gaorong Li, a researcher at Oxford University.

“For the first time, we demonstrate that many complex animals, normally only found in the Cambrian, were present in the Ediacaran period, meaning that they evolved much earlier than previously demonstrated by fossil evidence.”

For over half a century, people in Central Africa have told tales of the fish seen climbing waterfalls, but these claims have never been officially confirmed. Now, these fish have finally been caught on camera, studied more closely, and described in a study published in Scientific Reports.

An arduous vertical journey
The shellear fish (Parakneria thysi), found in the upper Congo Basin, are tiny 37–48 mm-long fish that can grow up to a size of around 96 mm. Researcher Pacifique Kiwele Mutambala from the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and his team documented the shellear fish climbing waterfalls from 2018–2020. In particular, the fish were recorded scaling the Luvilombo Falls on the Luvilombo River, which is a 50-foot (15 meter) waterfall. Thousands of shellear were seen migrating upstream, clinging to wet rock surfaces in the splash zone.

Humans may have been shaped in part by an unexpected force: repeated exposure to high-temperature burn injuries. New research suggests this long history has influenced how the body repairs damage, responds to infection, and reacts under severe trauma.

For over a million years, the ability to control fire has been central to human progress. It enabled cooking, warmth, and later technological development, helping drive both cultural and genetic change that distinguishes humans from other species. At the same time, this close relationship with fire introduced a unique and persistent risk of high-temperature injuries.

Humans experience burns, and survive them, far more often than other animals. While most species instinctively avoid fire, humans have integrated it into daily life. As a result, minor burns are a common experience for most people.

A study published in BioEssays, led by researchers at Imperial College London, proposes that this repeated exposure to burns may have shaped human evolution. The findings suggest that humans developed genetic traits that differ from other primates and mammals, influencing how the body handles both mild and severe burn injuries.

A Chinese satellite equipped with a robotic "octopus arm" has passed a key refueling test in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to state-run media. The achievement highlights China's continued leadership with this particular technology, which NASA has not yet caught up with.

The experimental spacecraft will eventually deploy a giant balloon in LEO, which could help solve another important issue surrounding satellite "megaconstellations" like SpaceX's Starlink network.

The satellite, dubbed Hukeda-2 (also known as Yuxing-3 06 within China), launched March 16 aboard the Kuaizhou-11 rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, according to the website of Jonathan McDowell, a now-retired astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking the movements of Earth-orbiting spacecraft for more than two decades. It was one of eight satellites deployed during this mission, and it is now orbiting Earth at an altitude of around 335 miles (540 kilometers).

Hukeda-2 is a demonstration satellite intended to test new technologies in LEO. Its most notable attachment is an octopus-like robotic arm that "can curl, twist and wrap around objects to work in tight, complex spaces, with a nozzle-like tip at one end designed to line up and connect with a target port," according to the South China Morning Post.

The arm is made of a series of spring-like tubes threaded with cables attached to a motor, allowing it to bend in almost any direction and make the small adjustments needed to dock with another satellite while both spacecraft are traveling at speeds of around 16,800 mph (27,000 km/h).

Using high-intensity lasers, researchers have taken an important step toward miniaturization of particle accelerators by demonstrating free-electron laser amplification at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths (27–50 nm), with an acceleration length of only a few millimeters. By generating high-quality, monoenergetic electron beams (i.e. beams where all the electrons have nearly the same energy), they have achieved a key milestone toward compact accelerator technologies.