Photo of Artemis II heat shield looks like an ethereal underwater world, but it's provided NASA with vital data

You wouldn’t think a resin heat shield would make for a particularly photogenic image, but Orion’s partially-submerged heat shield is the exception. There’s an ethereal beauty to the photograph (above), which US Navy divers took of the component’s underside, shortly after the Artemis II mission’s successful splashdown, off the coast of San Diego on April 10, 2026.

The image, released by NASA, isn’t just an important documentation of humanity’s farthest voyage from Earth, it’s vital in assessing the heat shield’s performance for future missions. The disc of Avcoat was all that separated the four astronauts from a blazing 3,000 degrees during re-entry, as the spacecraft hurtled towards earth at 35x the speed of sound.

The heat shield was one of Orion’s most talked-about components, given that the heat shield present in 2022’s uncrewed Artemis I mission sustained more damage than was expected. According to a CNN report, some experts had raised the alarm over the heat shield’s suitability. Thankfully, it looks like NASA’s investigations into the cause of the problem have paid dividends, with the space agency stating that both the imagery of the component shortly after splashdown and subsequent inspections revealed “significantly reduced” charring.

With NASA reporting that it’s “on Track for Future Missions,” we could see humans back on the lunar surface as early as 2028. The third Artemis mission is currently set to launch in 2027, but the BBC recently reported that Artemis III will not land on the Moon as previously thought.

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