Ahead of its scheduled deployment on Artemis III next year, it seems that the Artemis II crew successfully requested that a Nikon Z9 be added to the their launch manifest.
Apologies all round for this, but it seems that one of the fundamental premises of our Why NASA is sending a 10-year-old DSLR around the Moon article earlier this week was wrong.
In it we said that one of the main reasons that the Nikon D5 was chosen over the Nikon Z9 for the mission was because the Z9 had not been qualified for deep space. Well, it seems that that was incorrect. Peta Pixel has unearthed a Facebook Reel where Mission Commander Reid Wiseman talks about how the crew successfully lobbied for a single z9 camera to be added to the manifest.
“That’s the camera that the crew will be using on Artemis III, so we were fighting really hard to get that on the vehicle to test out in the high-radiation environment in deep space,” he said.
"We've done some training on the Z9, which is a great piece of gear," he continued. "We'll also have our two Nikon D5s, which are great in low light and great for optical viewing of the lunar surface with our long lens."
It sounds very much like the D5s are the primary cameras, with the Z9 being given a thorough real-world (if we can use that term in this context) testing on the 10-day mission. This is ahead of its metamorphosis into the HULC (Handheld Universal Lunar Camera, a specially adapted unit which will be used on the lunar surface.
The Orion spacecraft will only get within 7600 km (4700 miles) of the Moon's surface on this mission, so some long lenses will be definitely needed to get good shots of the far side.
The launch calendar and mission objectives of the Artemis project have been recently overhauled by NASA. While originally scheduled for a Moon landing, Artemis III will now test rendezvous and docking tests in low Earth orbit with one or both commercially developed lunar landers. These are SpaceX's Starship HLS and Blue Origin's Blue Moon. The crew will also test the new Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit.
Artemis III launch is currently scheduled for mid-2027. Artemis IV, scheduled for early 2028, will be the first mission to land on the Moon if all goes well with missions II and II.