If you spent any part of April 2026 refreshing a browser tab watching a little icon representing the Orion spacecraft loop around the Moon, you already know about AROW, NASA’s Artemis Real-time Orbit Website. It’s the tool that let millions of people follow Artemis 2 live, down to the mile, as astronauts flew farther from Earth than any human crew since Apollo. With Artemis 3 now on the calendar, people are already asking how to track it the same way. The honest answer involves a bit of a twist, because Artemis 3 isn’t the mission most people still think it is.
What AROW Actually Does
AROW, short for the Artemis Real-time Orbit Website, is NASA’s official live tracking tool for its deep space Orion missions. Rather than a vague animation, AROW pulls actual telemetry, real data collected by sensors on Orion and beamed down to Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and displays it as an interactive map. Users can watch the spacecraft’s exact distance from Earth, its distance from the Moon, current velocity, and elapsed mission time, all updating continuously from about one minute after liftoff through splashdown.
AROW first debuted for Artemis 1 in 2022, letting the public follow an uncrewed Orion capsule loop around the Moon. It returned for Artemis 2 in April 2026, this time tracking four real astronauts in real time as they became the first crew to leave low Earth orbit in over fifty years. Beyond the website itself, AROW’s data also powers an augmented reality feature inside the NASA app, letting users point their phone at the sky and see roughly where Orion is relative to their own location. If you want the full story of exactly what that April flight accomplished, our recap of the Artemis 2 trajectory and mission covers the free return path Orion flew around the Moon and back.
Here’s the Twist: Artemis 3 Isn’t a Moon Landing Anymore
For years, Artemis 3 was billed as the mission that would finally put astronauts back on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. That changed in February 2026, when NASA formally restructured its Artemis roadmap. Artemis 3 is no longer a landing mission at all, its now a complex test flight that stays entirely in low Earth orbit, designed to prove out rendezvous and docking procedures between Orion and the two commercial lunar landers under development, SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, before either one is trusted to carry astronauts down to the lunar surface. The actual first crewed Moon landing has been pushed to Artemis 4, currently targeted for 2028.
Its a similar approach to what NASA did with Apollo 9 back in 1969, testing the lunar module in Earth orbit before ever risking a landing attempt. During the roughly two week Artemis 3 mission, the crew will practice two separate dockings, one with a Starship HLS test article and one with a Blue Moon test article, proving both vehicles can safely link up with Orion before either gets cleared for an actual Moon landing mission.
Meet the Crew
NASA announced the Artemis 3 crew on June 9, 2026, and its a genuinely experienced lineup. Commander Randy Bresnik is a retired Marine Corps colonel making his third trip to space, having flown to the International Space Station aboard the space shuttle in 2009 and again via Soyuz in 2017. Pilot Luca Parmitano, an Italian astronaut with the European Space Agency, becomes the first ESA astronaut ever selected for an Artemis mission, bringing experience from two long-duration ISS stays. Mission specialist Frank Rubio holds the American record for longest single spaceflight, 371 days aboard the ISS between 2022 and 2023, and mission specialist Andre Douglas, a systems engineer and Coast Guard veteran who served as backup crew for Artemis 2, will be making his first trip to space. Astronaut Bob Heintz will serve as backup, able to step into any of the four roles if needed.
When It’s Actually Launching
Artemis 3 is currently targeted for sometime between mid and late 2027, though the exact date has shifted more than once as NASA works through the complexity of coordinating an SLS and Orion launch with two separate commercial lander test articles. NASA officials have said the window runs “no earlier than March, no later than June” of 2027, while some agency leadership has more recently suggested a slip toward the back half of the year is more likely. Given how much hardware and how many companies have to line up perfectly for this mission to fly, a further shift wouldn’t be a huge surprise, its worth checking NASA’s official Artemis blog closer to the date for the latest confirmed schedule.
How to Actually Track It When Launch Day Arrives
Once Artemis 3 does lift off, expect the same setup that worked so well for Artemis 2. AROW will almost certainly return, giving the public live telemetry on Orion’s position, speed, and distance throughout the mission, this time tracking a more complex flight profile involving multiple rendezvous and docking sequences in Earth orbit rather than a straightforward lunar flyby. NASA+ and the agency’s YouTube channel will carry live video coverage, including views from cameras aboard Orion itself, and the Artemis blog will post regular written mission updates throughout the flight. The NASA app’s augmented reality tracking feature is also expected to return, letting anyone with a smartphone point at the sky and get a rough sense of where the spacecraft actually is.
For now, the best way to stay ahead of Artemis 3 is simply keeping an eye on official NASA channels as 2027 approaches, launch dates for a mission this complex tend to firm up gradually rather than all at once.
Why This Mission Still Matters
It might sound like a letdown that Artemis 3 wont actually touch down on the Moon, but the mission is arguably just as important as an actual landing would have been. Successfully docking with two entirely different commercial landers, built by two competing companies, in the unforgiving environment of space is exactly the kind of high stakes rehearsal NASA needs before ever trusting either vehicle with a crewed descent to the lunar surface. If Artemis 3 goes well, it clears the way for Artemis 4 to attempt the real thing, landing astronauts near the Moon’s south pole as early as 2028, in a region scientists believe holds significant deposits of water ice.
For more detailed background on the mission restructuring and crew announcement, check out the official coverage from NASA and the additional reporting from The Planetary Society.
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