Phenomena: Artemis II Re-entry
Satellite: GOES-18 (GOES West)
Product: GeoColor, Group Flash Count Density
Instrument: Advanced Baseline Imager, Geostationary Lightning Mapper
Timespan: April 10, 2026, 23:41 UTC - April 11, 2026, 00:01 UTC
They’re home! As the Artemis II astronauts approached splashdown on April 10, 2026, NOAA’s GOES West watched as their historic mission came to a triumphant conclusion in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
The composite animation above combines both GeoColor imagery and data from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM). One of GLM’s key products, called Group Flash Count Density or Flash Extent Density (FED), shows the number of lightning flashes that occur within a specific area over a given period of time. FED was the first GLM product routinely available to National Weather Service forecasters and is a powerful tool for monitoring and tracking lightning in near real-time.
But lightning isn’t the only thing the FED can detect. It can also pick up atmospheric “flashes” from phenomena such as exploding meteors (bolides) and spacecraft re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Just last month, NOAA’s GOES satellites observed several bolides across the U.S., including along the Ohio/Pennsylvania border and another near Houston.
As the Artemis II crew blazed through the upper atmosphere at nearly 35 times the speed of sound, GOES West detected the bright glow and intense heat from their Orion spacecraft as a streak of “lightning” across the sky.
NOAA’s GOES West geostationary satellite, also known as GOES-18, provides geostationary satellite coverage of the Western Hemisphere, including the United States, the Pacific Ocean, Alaska and Hawaii. First launched in March 2018, the satellite became fully operational in February 2019.