On Thursday, during Artemis II’s trip to the moon, Commander Reed Wiseman encountered a technical problem some of us on Earth can relate to: Microsoft Outlook was not working. In a conversation captured in NASA’s Artemis livestream and shared on BlueSky, Wiseman told Mission Control: “I also notice that I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither of them are working.”
To deal with the problem, Mission Control had to remotely access Wiseman’s personal computing device (PCD), a Microsoft Surface Pro. During a press conference Thursday, Artemis flight director Judd Frayling said NASA has fixed the issue, “It’s not unusual. We have it on-station all the time. You know, sometimes there are problems configuring Outlook, especially when you don’t have a network that’s directly connected. And so essentially we had to reload her files on Outlook to get it to work.”
NASA uses a combination of its Near Space Network and Deep Space Network to stay in touch with Artemis II, relying on a mix of antennas around the world and satellites in orbit. Mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, will have to transfer communications between these networks as Artemis II gets too far from Earth.
In addition to the Microsoft Surface Pro, the Artemis II crew’s gear list also includes Nikon D5 DSLR cameras, a ZCube video encoder, and handheld GoPro cameras for filming content for Disney/National Geographic documentaries. The crew were also allowed to bring their own phones with them – you can even see their phones in the pockets of their spacesuits in NASA’s livestream.
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