48 OregonStater.org PHOTOS BY NASA OUR COMMUNITY MOON SHOT How one alumna helped bring the Artemis II mission to Earth. BY > NANCY STEINBERG ↑ Sara Schmidt at NASA Mission Control. It’s April 2026, and the world is watching in fascination as a crew of four astronauts travels farther from Earth than any other humans have gone before.This is NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17 in 1972. Sara Schmidt, M.S. ’24, is watching, too, eyes glued to screens for hours. But she is not in her living room, watching on her phone. Schmidt sits in front of a ring of huge monitors in the Science Evaluation Room of Mission Control at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. Schmidt is part of a team that supwas definitely afraid of airplanes, so rocket ships were off the table. Being an astronaut was not something I considered,” she says. She knew she was good at math, though, and wondered what kind of career she should aim for. A first-generation college student, she took community college classes in search of the right fit. Her breakthrough moment came when she landed a spot in NASA’s competitive Community College Aerospace Scholars Program, giving her the opportunity to spend four days at a workshop at Johnson. Suddenly her purpose became clear. “The people I was with had the same interests as me, and I felt instantly comfortable there. So, I thought, if this is what NASA is like, I definitely want to work here,” she says. She transferred to University of Houston for her last year of school, earning a degree in environmental sciences, and then landed a job back at Johnson on a team that ran operations for International Space Station missions. Each day, her team developed and transmitted instructions to the ISS crew for the day’s image collection to satisfy a variety of goals. “Researchers around the world would submit requests for particular kinds of images — during COVID there was one study on how COVID affected nighttime city lights, for example,” Schmidt says. ports photographic data collection by NASA missions, with a current focus on lunar missions. Her team issues instructions for taking photos, and then processes, curates, distributes and archives the imagery for the science team. These images — about 11,000 publicly available ones from the Artemis mission alone — are critical for understanding everything from the moon’s geology and history to planning future missions to the moon and even Mars. Houston is Schmidt’s hometown; she grew up visiting Space Center Houston, but she didn’t have space-related ambitions then. “I
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