Two Keepsakes With Pasadena Ties Ride Artemis II Around the Moon

Among the 10 pounds of mementos packed aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft as it hurtles back toward Earth is a copy of a photograph that was born in a Pasadena control room 62 years ago — the first close-up image of the Moon ever captured by an American spacecraft.

The photo negative, from the Ranger 7 mission managed by the Caltech-run Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is one of two keepsakes in the Artemis II flight kit with direct ties to the Pasadena area.

The other is a 1-inch-by-1-inch swatch of muslin fabric from the original 1903 Wright Flyer — the same aircraft whose cloth traveled to Mars aboard JPL’s Ingenuity helicopter in 2021. Together, they link the laboratory’s decades of exploration to the four astronauts now completing the first crewed voyage beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Artemis II launched April 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, completed a seven-hour lunar flyby on April 6, passing within roughly 4,067 miles of the Moon’s surface. Splashdown is scheduled for approximately 8:07 p.m. EDT Friday, April 10, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.

The Ranger 7 connection reaches back to July 28, 1964, when JPL launched the probe toward the Moon after six consecutive failures in the Ranger program. Three days later, on July 31, Ranger 7 transmitted more than 4,300 images of the lunar surface in its final 17 minutes of flight before slamming into a region between Mare Nubium and Oceanus Procellarum — a spot scientists renamed Mare Cognitum, Latin for “The Known Sea.” The images, received at JPL in Pasadena, helped confirm that Apollo astronauts could safely land in the Moon’s smooth mare regions.

The mission’s success also produced one of JPL’s most enduring customs. Dick Wallace, a trajectory engineer on the Ranger team, had handed out peanuts in the mission operations room to calm nerves on launch day.

“I thought passing out peanuts might take some of the edge off the anxiety in the mission operations room,” Wallace said, according to a NASA account of the tradition’s origin.

Ranger 7 performed flawlessly. So did Rangers 8 and 9. The peanuts stuck. Today, bags and jars of them appear in JPL’s mission control during critical events — launches, orbit insertions, landings — a ritual that has persisted for more than six decades.

The copy of a 4-by-5-inch Ranger 7 photo negative now aboard Orion represents what NASA described in a January 2026 press release as “a major turning point in the race to the Moon.”

The Wright Flyer swatch carries its own layered history. The fabric, lent to NASA by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, comes from the plane the Wright Brothers used in the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. A smaller cut of the same swatch previously flew aboard space shuttle Discovery on STS-51D in 1985, making its Artemis II trip a second journey into space. After the mission, the fabric will be returned to the museum and reunited with two other Wright Flyer swatches, according to NASA.

For Pasadena-area residents, the Wright Flyer connection runs through JPL as well. In 2021, JPL’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter carried a postage-stamp-sized piece of Wright Flyer muslin, obtained from the Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio, when it became the first aircraft to achieve powered flight on another planet on April 19 of that year. A different swatch, but the same aircraft — and the same laboratory that built the machine to carry it.

“Historical artifacts flying aboard Artemis II reflect the long arc of American exploration and the generations of innovators who made this moment possible,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the January press release announcing the flight kit’s contents.

The flight kit also includes a 13-by-8-inch American flag that flew on the first and last space shuttle missions, an Apollo 18 flag making its premiere flight, soil samples from Artemis I Moon Trees planted at NASA centers, tree seeds from the Canadian Space Agency, and an SD card containing millions of names from NASA’s “Send Your Name to Space” campaign.

On April 6, the Artemis II crew broke the record for the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth — 248,655 miles — surpassing the mark set by Apollo 13 in 1970.

The next time peanuts are passed around JPL’s mission control, it will be because of a mission that carries a piece of the moment that started the tradition.