NASA's Artemis II Crew Visits 'Most Lunar-Like' Place on Earth For Training

To prepare for NASA 's first journey to the moon in over half a century, the crew of the Artemis II spent the summer training in Earth's most moon-like environment.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, alongside Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, as well as backup crew members NASA astronaut Andre Douglas and CSA astronaut Jenni Gibbons, hiked across Iceland to prepare them for the rugged terrain of the moon.

This marks the latest in a long series of space missions that have gone to Iceland to train, dating back all the way to the Apollo missions.

"Apollo astronauts said Iceland was one of the most lunar-like training locations that they went to in their training," Cindy Evans, Artemis geology training lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a NASA statement. "It has lunar-like planetary processes—in this case, volcanism. It has the landscape; it looks like the Moon. And it has the scale of features astronauts will both be observing and exploring on the Moon."

Iceland's landscape, filled with lava fields, volcanic craters, and barren, rocky terrain, closely resembles the lunar surface. Even special rocks called basalts and breccias, which are found on the moon, are also found in Iceland due to the country's intense volcanic activity.

The geology of Iceland offers astronauts a chance to practice working in conditions similar to what they will encounter on the moon, and to train in techniques for identifying, collecting, and documenting rocks and soil samples using specially designed tools.

The astronaut crew also practiced their navigation skills and spent their time living and working together as they would in space.

"The tools we used during the Apollo missions haven't changed that much for what we're planning for the Artemis missions," Trevor Graff, exploration geologist and the hardware and testing lead on the Artemis science team at NASA Johnson, said in the statement. "Traditionally, a geologist goes out with just standard tool sets of things like rock hammers and scoops or shovels to sample the world around them, both on the surface and subsurface."

Sadly, the crew of Artemis II will not land on the moon. Following the unmanned Artemis I mission, which successfully launched the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spacecraft on a trip around the moon and back to Earth. Artemis II will be the first crewed mission of the Artemis program, sending four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft to orbit the moon over the course of 10 days, before returning to Earth. Artemis II is estimated to launch "no earlier than Sept. 2025," according to NASA , with the crew becoming the second ever to travel beyond low Earth orbit, and the first since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Artemis III will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. This mission is planned to land astronauts near the lunar South Pole, where they will spend approximately a week on the surface c onducting scientific research. NASA estimates that this mission will launch "no earlier than Sept. 2026."

"There's really transformational science that we can learn by getting boots back on the Moon, getting samples back, and being able to do field geology with trained astronauts on the surface," said Angela Garcia, exploration geologist and an Artemis II science officer at NASA Johnson.