Visualizing the Artemis II Mission

Summary

VIDEO In April 2026, four astronauts flew around the Moon for the first time in over fifty years. Hank Green, a science communicator and YouTuber, built an awesome website to visualize the many photos taken on and around the spacecraft throughout the mission. I was inspired by Hank’s project (as I am by most of his projects and content), and as a recent addition to the Foxglove team, I saw a great opportunity to both learn our tool and explore the same dataset in a new way. Foxglove is built for robotics, it organizes and visualizes the sensor data that goes into developing and debugging autonomous systems. The same tools generalize well beyond robots, and it’s a genuinely fun environment to build things in. I knew I could use the 3D panel to plot Orion’s actual path through inertial space; something you can rotate, zoom into, and follow in real time, while a second tab kept the photos and mission state synchronized to wherever you were in the timeline. Getting the Data The pipeline started with two sources. Orion’s trajectory came from the JPL Horizons API, which provides precise ephemeris data for solar system objects including crewed spacecraft. The photos and their metadata came from Hank’s Artemis-Timeline project, where a single photos.js file captures everything: timestamp, camera type, caption, photographer, and a link to the full-resolution JPEG for each shot. A few Python scripts handle the rest. One fetches the trajectory, one downloads and resizes the photos from their original multi-megabyte RAW exports down to a more manageable ~1280px, and a third fuses everything onto a single synchronized timeline and writes it out as an MCAP file. Simple enough in hindsight, though getting the timestamps to line up cleanly took a few passes. Building the 3D Scene Now that I had all the data I needed, the next step was to build out the 3D scene to follow the trajectory. Early on I tried a primitive URDF; boxes and cylinders roughly standing in for the spacecraft. It...