Several Canadians are among the 34 global organizations and individuals who will officially help NASA with tracking Artemis 2 and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen around the Moon, by passively examining the radio waves from the Orion spacecraft.
NASA selected the Canadian Space Agency, the University of New Brunswick and individual Scott Tilley (who has been posting about his setup and pre-flight testing regularly on X), as part of the list of participants announced Jan. 23.
The participants were selected from a request for proposals NASA issued in August 2025, which attracted responses including “established commercial service providers, members of academia, and individual amateur radio enthusiasts,” according to the agency.
NASA is aiming to increase its future commercial options under the SCaN (Space Communication and Navigation) program, as the greater Artemis program aims for a more permanent presence on the Moon in the 2030s or so. The Artemis 2 tracking effort follows on from a network of previous groups and individuals that passively tracked radio waves for Artemis 1’s uncrewed round-the-moon mission in 2022.
“These volunteers [for Artemis 2] will submit their data to NASA for analysis, helping the agency better assess the broader aerospace community’s tracking capabilities, and identify ways to augment future Moon and Mars mission support. There are no funds exchanged as a part of this collaborative effort,” the agency stated.
Artemis 2 is set to launch no earlier than Feb. 6, carrying Jeremy Hansen and his three NASA crewmates, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch. Hansen’s seat was paid for principally using the Canadarm3 robotic arm being built by MDA Space, which will serve on the Gateway lunar space station later in the decade.
Artemis 2 safely reached the launch pad on Jan. 17, which was covered on site at the Kennedy Space Center by SpaceQ. Testing at the pad is ongoing, with the wet dress rehearsal (WDR) of fueling operations expected to conclude no later than Feb. 1, if the schedule holds.
WDR is one of the key milestones to a launch approval, and NASA has said it is expecting things will be smoother than the process for Artemis 1. The predecessor mission required extra months of diagnosis (and evaluation back at the Vehicle Assembly Building) due to leaks and other technical issues during WDR. Design and operations changes have been made for Artemis 2 based on lessons learned from Artemis 1, NASA said.
To be clear, NASA already has Artemis 2 mission tracking in place through its long-established Deep Space Network or DSN (a trio of antennas around the world, which track at all deep-space missions) as well as the Near Space Network, for mission phases closer to Earth. But there are pressures upon these systems.
For example, DSN is aging. Iterations of the network have been in place since 1958, and the main antennas at Goldstone Observatory (California), Madrid, Spain and Canberra, Australia finished completion between 1958 and 1965. Notably, Goldstone is offline until May 2026 due to an over-rotation issue that occurred last September, according to SpaceNews.
Artemis 2 can nonetheless safely fly, but as a human mission it takes priority over the various deep-space missions NASA tracks with DSN. A primary example is the James Webb Space Telescope, whose managers recently issued a notice to the science community warning that depending on the launch of Artemis 2 there may be moderate impacts to scheduling. Canada is also a participant in JWST science and there is a chance some work could be affected.
Artemis 2 is scheduled to last 10 days and will be tracked, on a volunteer basis, by “47 ground assets spanning 14 different countries,” the agency noted.