Track Artemis II live as Orion returns to Earth

Orion is in space, the Artemis II crew is returning from the moon, and you can follow their journey without leaving Earth.

NASA's Artemis Real-time Orbit Website, or AROW, allows the public to track the moonship. During the roughly 10-day test flight, anyone with a phone or computer can see how far the crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — are from Earth.

The tracker turns a complex deep space mission into something easier to understand at a glance. With data from sensors on the spacecraft, AROW takes information already flowing to mission control in Houston and interprets it into simple visuals for the layperson. Instead of trying to picture where the crew might be, you can actually see their path, distances, and major milestones as they happen.

People can download the NASA app or go to the website to give the tracker a spin. 

AROW began updating about a minute after liftoff on Wednesday, April 1, and will keep feeding live information until Orion dives back into Earth's atmosphere for a splashdown at the end of the mission. Online, users can see where the spacecraft sits in space and trace its figure-eight route.

NASA's Artemis Real-time Orbit Website provides the public with information about the Artemis II moon mission as it happens. Credit: NASA / AROW screenshot

NASA designed the website to show more than a dot on a map. It highlights key moments in the mission and points out features on the moon, including landing sites from the Apollo program. That lets viewers connect what they’re seeing today through Artemis — named after Apollo's twin sister in Greek mythology — with the first era of human exploration on the lunar surface.

The NASA app includes similar features, plus an augmented reality tracker. After calibration, the app uses phone sensors to tell you how to move your device so on‑screen markers line up with where Orion is relative to your position on Earth. 

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

For people who love to pore through the numbers, AROW also shares precise data describing Orion's location and motion.

Don’t miss out on our latest stories: Add Mashable as a trusted news source in Google.

Since launch, the crew has been in a high-Earth orbit, allowing them time to check out the systems aboard the spacecraft before pushing into a moon-bound trajectory.

Artemis II is NASA's first crewed mission in the Artemis campaign and a major step toward landing on the moon and learning how to live there. By sending astronauts around the moon and bringing them home safely, NASA is attempting to prove the systems needed for future lunar landings — and, perhaps down the road, the first human mission to Mars.