In late 2026, four astronauts will fly around the Moon aboard Orion — the first crewed mission of the Artemis program. The flight will last about 10 days, and NASA has decided to make it as transparent as possible: anyone with an internet connection will be able to follow the spacecraft in near real time.
To do this, the agency launched AROW (Artemis Real-time Orbit Website) — a website and mobile app that show Orion's exact position in space throughout the flight. This is not just a visualization exercise: the data comes directly from sensors aboard the spacecraft.
How data travels from Orion to viewers
Sensors on board Orion send telemetry to NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston. From there, the information reaches AROW with almost no delay.
Tracking begins about one minute after liftoff and continues through the spacecraft's atmospheric reentry at the end of the mission. That means the tracker will run continuously for the entire ten-day flight — from launch to splashdown.
On the website, users can see Orion's distance from Earth, its distance from the Moon, mission elapsed time, and the spacecraft's path relative to both bodies. The site also highlights key mission milestones and information about Apollo-era lunar landing sites, offering a point of comparison with Orion's new route.
Augmented reality instead of a screen map
NASA's mobile app offers the same core features as the website, plus an augmented reality mode. After a brief calibration sequence, the app guides users where to point their phone to see the direction toward Orion in the actual sky overhead.
This feature won't be active immediately after launch — it becomes available only after Orion separates from the rocket's upper stage, roughly three hours into the mission.
Beyond the visual display, AROW will also output so-called state vectors — precise data describing Orion's position and motion. These numbers are aimed less at casual viewers and more at developers, artists, and anyone who wants to build their own tracking app or data visualization.
Data for independent projects and visualizations
NASA also plans to publish the mission's full trajectory data — an ephemeris — downloadable from the AROW page once the mission begins. This dataset allows precise calculation of Orion's position at any moment and can be used with independent spaceflight software, telescope tracking systems, or for building physics models and animations.
Before that data becomes available, though, AROW will run a proximity operations demonstration — a test evaluating the manual handling qualities of Orion. Only after this demonstration will the full trajectory data be released.
Artemis II is the first crewed step in the Artemis campaign, after which NASA plans to work toward a long-term presence at the Moon, confirming the systems needed for future lunar surface missions and, eventually, paving the way to Mars.
