ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Two Rochester Institute of Technology alumni played a key role in capturing stunning images from NASA’s Artemis II lunar flyby mission earlier this month.
Paul Reickert and Katrina Willoughby are both flight operations imagery instructors at NASA. They trained the four Artemis II astronauts and both graduated in the early 2000s at what used to be the “Imaging and Photographic Technology Program” at RIT.
News10NBC’s Garrett Chan spoke with Reickert about training the astronauts on various photography techniques.
“To watch the crew launch on the vehicle, do their translunar injection burn, slingshot off to the moon and fly around it and see all the spectacular images, I was proud of our mission here and how it really impacted the world,” Reickert said.
The astronauts trained for two years to prepare for all the stops and scenarios along their 10-day journey with a very slim margin for error.
“Like one of our challenges is or was, how do you get a really good picture of the Earth and the Moon in the same shot where most of the field of view is the black of space? Well, the light meter inside the camera doesn’t really give you the right answer. So how are you going to solve that problem?” Reickert said.
The cameras the astronauts used were mostly off-the-shelf equipment.
“We had a Nikon D5 camera and we also had a Nikon Z9 camera. And of course the camera is just one part of the tool. You have to have certain lenses. So we ended up flying three lenses,” Reickert said.
At the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at RIT, there’s a lot of student and faculty pride. Director Christye Sisson shared her excitement about the mission.
“It’s just an incredibly exciting moment. We love photography. We love everything about photography, both as a science, technology and an art form. And it’s just the Artemis Two mission has just been a wonderful sort of demonstration of all of those things,” Sisson said.
As the world reflects on a space journey that took four astronauts farther than any human before, it’s shining a new perspective on the place we call home and excitement for future generations looking up past the stars.
“As I’ve been looking at this photograph for a few weeks now, picking out details like the aurora borealis up here, grounds the image in a very human perspective, reminds us that this image is taken from a capsule in space,” Sisson said.
“We’re on this little blue marble out in space and there’s not really a whole lot out there around it. And that’s our home. That’s kind of our cocoon. And it supplies life for all of us,” Reickert said.
Reickert said NASA’s already preparing for the Artemis III mission. Paul and Katrina said they’re training prospective astronauts again on using the cameras.
The Artemis III mission is expected to launch in the summer of next year. It aims to test landing and docking capabilities of the Orion spacecraft on the moon’s surface.
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