Artemis II Science Data Released

On October 7, the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) announced the release of the data archives from the Artemis II mission. Artemis II was a crewed flight test to demonstrate that the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft could safely support human life in deep space beyond low Earth orbit. Orion launched April 1, 2026 and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10, 2026, carrying Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch of NASA, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency.

This release contains source, raw, processed, derived, browse, and document products from the mission: crew handheld camera images, Orion vehicle camera images and video, mission audio with transcripts and crew annotations, Orion storage locker temperature and humidity data, mission documents, and Spacecraft Planet Instrument C-matrix Events (SPICE) kernels.

To read more details and get links to all the Artemis II data bundles, see the announcement on the PDS Geosciences Node website.

21 years of Swift Science Data Available

In the month of October, NASA officially retired the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which spent nearly 22 years observing gamma-ray bursts and other quick-fire cosmic events. All the datasets from Swift’s decades-long mission remain openly available for anyone to download and use for their science.

The Swift archive contains nearly 22 years of brightness measurements of all kinds of cosmic outbursts, multiwavelength spectra, over 1.5 million images from its Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope, and much more. The full dataset spans approximately 12 terabytes, the storage equivalent of about 600 high-definition movies.

For more information on Swift, read the article about Swift’s retirement. To explore Swift data, visit NASA's Swift archives.

OSDR Releases Five New Space Biology Datasets

NASA’s Open Science Data Repository (OSDR) released five new datasets in September, expanding public access to research on how living things respond to spaceflight and space like conditions. The new datasets include studies of bacteria, human brain organoids, human peripheral blood models, giving researchers and the public more information to explore new questions about health and biology in space.  

• OSD-729 – Bulk RNA-seq dataset titled “Biofilm formation is correlated with low nutrient and simulated microgravity conditions in a Burkholderia isolate from the ISS water processor assembly.”
• OSD-1008 – Proteomics dataset titled “Proteomic dataset of MECP2-deficient and wild-type human brain organoids under spaceflight and ground conditions.”
• OSD-1012 – Microarray dataset titled “Impact of Neutron Exposure on Global Gene Expression in a Human Peripheral Blood Model.”
• OSD-1014 – Bulk RNA-seq dataset titled “Distinct molecular responses of human intestinal organoids to proton and photon radiation.”
• OSD-987 – Bulk RNA-seq dataset titled “Comparison of Streptococcus mutans Growth-Phase Dependent Transcriptome Changes in Two Different Simulated Microgravity Models.”

Explore these and hundreds of additional space biology datasets through the OSDR portal.

1000 TESS Planets Discovered

On October 8, the NASA Exoplanet Archive announced that it had catalogued the 1,000th planet discovered from data taken by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The new additions bring the archive's total confirmed planet count to 6,445.

TESS launched in April 2018 to survey the sky in search of transiting exoplanets around the brightest stars near Earth. The mission's observations may help scientists better understand how planets form while adding to the growing list of targets for further study by newer missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope.

Many more TESS planet discoveries are still to come. There are currently 4,823 TESS Project Candidates waiting to be confirmed, and data for more than 8,000 candidates have been uploaded to NASA’s Exoplanet Follow-up Observing Program (ExoFOP) by the scientific community.

For more exoplanet data news, see the Exoplanet Archive news page.

OSDR Visualization Portal Adds More Space Biology Datasets

The OSDR Biological Data and Visualization Portal now include seven additional datasets that users can explore through interactive tools. The new studies include research on mice, plants, and other organisms, covering topics such as changes in gene activity during spaceflight, responses to different levels of gravity, and other biological changes observed during space missions. The update gives researchers, students, and other users more opportunities to explore NASA’s space biology data through interactive visualizations.  

The newly available datasets include OSD-235, OSD-238, OSD-251, OSD-427, OSD-511, OSD-42, and OSD-70.

Image