Yes, tracking a moon mission can be a personal experience - as many of students on several university campuses discovered. In Pennsylvania, Sawyer Mervis and Jake Wendt were up on a campus rooftop in the early morning hours with a parabolic antenna and other student-built equipment. They were collecting data for the US space agency NASA from the 248,655-mile flight around the moon. The receiving station had been a team project, with the Panther Amateur Radio Club at the University of Pittsburgh receiving guidance and support from faculty in various engineering departments.

Farther south, students at the American University in Washington, D.C. tracked the Orion spacecraft with a radio dish about six and a half feet wide installed by physics major Ankur Purao at a university-owned property in nearby Warren, Virginia. Emotions ran high for everyone toward the end of the 10-day mission. Suddenly the students were no longer tasked with an assignment that called for tracking, collecting data and measuring Doppler shift: Now all eyes were on the return of the four crew members as their journey ended safely in a Pacific splashdown.

That conclusion brought the Artemis 2 mission back home to all of them. As American University first-year student Shafaq Yousaf said: [quote]: "We're gonna be telling generations about this - and that we've played a part in this." [endquote]