Moon ShotHow one alumna helped bring the Artemis II mission to Earth.

It’s April 2026, and the world is watching in fascination as a crew of four astronauts travels farther from Earth than any other humans have gone before. This is NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Sara Schmidt, M.S. ’24, is watching, too, eyes glued to screens for hours. But she is not in her living room, watching on her phone. Schmidt sits in front of a ring of huge monitors in the Science Evaluation Room of Mission Control at Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Schmidt is part of a team that supports photographic data collection by NASA missions, with a current focus on lunar missions. Her team issues instructions for taking photos, and then processes, curates, distributes and archives the imagery for the science team. These images — about 11,000 publicly available ones from the Artemis mission alone — are critical for understanding everything from the moon’s geology and history to planning future missions to the moon and even Mars.

Houston is Schmidt’s hometown; she grew up visiting Space Center Houston, but she didn’t have space-related ambitions then. “I was definitely afraid of airplanes, so rocket ships were off the table. Being an astronaut was not something I considered,” she says.

Clockwise from top left:  One of Schmidt’s favorite mission photos; astronaut Reid Wiseman using the software developed by Schmidt’s team to report lunar observations; this image of NASA Mission Control watching the launch went viral after social media viewers noted the number of women in the room; “I got full body chills when I saw the photos,” Schmidt says about the first images returned from the lunar flyby, like this one of Earthset.

She knew she was good at math, though, and wondered what kind of career she should aim for. A first-generation college student, she took community college classes in search of the right fit.

Her breakthrough moment came when she landed a spot in NASA’s competitive Community College Aerospace Scholars Program, giving her the opportunity to spend four days at a workshop at Johnson. Suddenly her purpose became clear.

“The people I was with had the same interests as me, and I felt instantly comfortable there. So, I thought, if this is what NASA is like, I definitely want to work here,” she says.

She transferred to University of Houston for her last year of school, earning a degree in environmental sciences, and then landed a job back at Johnson on a team that ran operations for International Space Station missions. Each day, her team developed and transmitted instructions to the ISS crew for the day’s image collection to satisfy a variety of goals. “Researchers around the world would submit requests for particular kinds of images — during COVID there was one study on how COVID affected nighttime city lights, for example,” Schmidt says.

During the pandemic, Schmidt decided that if she could find a strong online-only program that allowed her to keep working, it would be the ideal time to further her education. The Oregon State online interdisciplinary graduate program in environmental sciences fit the bill perfectly. Without the Ecampus option for this degree, “I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Schmidt says. Her graduate project examined ways to use green infrastructure to address catastrophic flooding in Houston.

“My master’s program took coordination, organization and dedication that I hadn’t experienced before,” she says. “A few months after completing the master’s project, I was tasked with writing mission documents for imagery, which were only slightly shorter than the master’s project paper. Without the master’s, that work documentation would have been so scary. It certainly helped me tackle other massive projects with more confidence than if it was a pre-master’s project.”

As the Artemis project ramped up at NASA, Schmidt’s group pivoted to providing operational support for the lunar science team, similar to what they had been doing for the ISS. They knew, in theory, what images they wanted the astronaut team to capture, but issues like slight timing changes and lunar illumination meant they had to revisit those plans on the fly after launch and send new sets of instructions. Schmidt recalls the feeling of triumph when that revised photography plan was successfully transmitted to the spacecraft.

Her team had developed the software that provided visualizations and instructions for image capture with the mission’s two cameras, as well as a system that makes it possible to annotate directly on the photos in real time. This aspect of data collection was critical, as it allowed the astronauts to circle items of interest on the photos and jot down observations that they might have otherwise forgotten.

For Schmidt, one of the biggest moments of the mission came in the middle of the night as astronauts transmitted the first few photos from the lunar flyby. “I got full body chills when I saw the photos — they were better than anything I could have ever imagined,” she says. “The first one was one of the eclipse shots, this dark orb of the moon with light behind it, and I thought, ‘This is the coolest thing I have ever seen in my life. This is what it was all for.’”

Post-splashdown, her team is now responsible for processing all of the photos and archiving them for the science team so they can be used for decades to come. Many photos and their accompanying commentary by the astronauts — annotations, simultaneous audio recordings — describe places never before seen by human eyes.

Schmidt notes that scientists still conduct research using images taken more than 50 years ago during the Apollo missions. The Artemis images will contribute to those projects, as well as to new initiatives not yet imagined.

Her work is helping bring the next era of space exploration into focus — for the astronauts who will walk on the moon, for those who’ve set their sights on Mars and for everyone watching back on Earth.