Four People in a Pixel

A radar image of NASA's Orion spacecraft, captured by the Green Bank Telescope when it was over 343,000 km from Earth. Each pixel represents the capsule's position and velocity — and as scientist Will Armentrout noted when sharing the data with colleagues: "There are four people in those pixels." (Credit : NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/J.Hellerman)

When NASA's Artemis II spacecraft carried four astronauts around the Moon earlier this year, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope was quietly watching from a quiet valley in West Virginia. The Green Bank Telescope tracked the Orion capsule across 213,000 miles of empty space with a precision that would embarrass most speedometers and what it produced isn't just an engineering triumph. It's a glimpse of how the world's most sensitive ears are becoming indispensable to the future of human spaceflight.

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