Four Artemis II astronauts in an Orion space capsule are heading home after travelling around the moon.
Space Operations New Zealand (SpaceOps NZ) equipment at Warkworth is collecting the data.
SpaceOps NZ chief executive Robin McNeill said Nasa’s Goddard Spaceflight Centre put the call out last year for stations with large-aperture antennae to take part in Doppler tracking of the Orion capsule.
‘‘It was a chance for us to participate with Goddard, get to understand Nasa better.’’
Doppler tracking measures the change in radio waves that happens between a transmitter from space and a receiver on the ground as the transmitter in space moves.
SpaceOps NZ, along with 30 other stations throughout the world, is recording the data.
This was the first successful moon mission the company had been involved in.
It worked with a group who attempted an unmanned mission to the moon last year that was aborted when the spacecraft landed on the moon and fell over.
The data collected would help Nasa analyse the mission afterwards, Mr McNeill said.
Antennae were able to detect when the radio signal frequency changed as the Orion spacecraft approached the moon, left Earth’s gravity and was influenced by the gravitational pull of the moon.
That information was important for planning space missions.
Space was big and there was only so much fuel on the spacecraft, he said.
‘‘It’s not like the movies where you can do an extra burn or trip rocket motors on and go at warp speed too.’’
The company had upgraded its Warkworth antennae, one of which was 30m in diameter and the other 12m.
It was a good opportunity for the company to contribute to the international space community, Mr McNeill said.
‘‘It would be proof of our ability to track lunar missions and participate in future lunar missions.’’
The company had 12 staff in Invercargill and one permanently at Warkworth but during the space expedition half the engineering staff were at Warkworth.
Some people questioned the necessity of sending astronauts to the moon, he said.
People were far more efficient at gathering information but trips to the moon had changed people’s perspective of Earth.
The Earthrise photograph taken by astronaut Bill Enders in 1968 had been a wake-up call, he said.
‘‘Humanity realised there’s nowhere else to go.
‘‘We couldn’t afford to muck up ‘Spaceship Earth’ because there’s absolutely nowhere else to go.’’
It was thought the space missions were about studying stars and the planets.
‘‘In fact, what we’re learning about is planet Earth and how we can look after it.’’
