Canadian students track Artemis II moon mission from New Brunswick

Five engineering students at the University of New Brunswick have spent the last eight months preparing for a mission they will never leave the ground to witness. When Artemis II launches, they will be sitting in front of computer screens in Fredericton, watching signals arrive from a spacecraft orbiting the moon—and NASA will be watching what they do with those signals.

UNB is the only Canadian university officially participating in NASA's volunteer tracking network for Artemis II, one of just 34 organizations worldwide selected to monitor the Orion spacecraft. The mission itself is historic: a ten-day crewed journey around the moon carrying American astronauts and Canadian Jeremy Hansen, the first humans to travel beyond Earth orbit since 1972. But what makes UNB's role unusual is that the university is not simply observing from the sidelines. The data these students collect will be uploaded to NASA daily, contributing to the space agency's broader understanding of how distributed ground networks can support deep-space missions.

Brent Petersen, an electrical and computer engineering professor at UNB, leads the effort. His team will operate a satellite dish mounted atop Gillin Hall, recording the date, time, and frequency of signals received from Orion as it travels toward the moon. The Earth Station was never built for deep-space work—it was designed for closer targets—but Petersen notes it successfully picked up transmissions from the James Webb Space Telescope, which orbits roughly 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. The moon, by comparison, sits only 300,000 kilometers away. The math suggested it would work. "It bodes well for our Earth Station being able to pick up signals from Artemis II," he said.

The five students selected for the project all hold amateur radio licenses, a prerequisite for the work. Olivia Ferry Rice, a sixth-year software engineering student, sees the mission as a doorway. "I'm in my last year, so I'm taking every opportunity, getting my foot in the door, in the space industry and actually being part of a real space mission," she said. Chris Carson, a fourth-year electrical engineering student, echoes the sentiment. For both, the appeal is not abstract—it is the chance to apply classroom learning to something that matters, to contribute to work that NASA itself depends on.

Petersen feels the weight of that responsibility acutely. "I feel like I'm a student again because I'm working hard to try and put everything in place and help everybody, and it's like NASA will be grading me," he said. The remark captures something real about the project: it is not a simulation or a classroom exercise. NASA wants the data. NASA will use it. The stakes, though modest in the grand scheme of a lunar mission, are genuine.

When Artemis II lifts off, the UNB team will begin the work they have prepared for. They will collect signals, timestamp them, record frequencies, and send the results north to Houston. Whether their months of preparation translate into clean data and useful contributions remains to be seen. But the students involved will have done something few Canadian engineering undergraduates ever do: they will have participated in an actual space mission, not as observers but as essential parts of the infrastructure that makes it work.