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I Am Artemis: Tom Percy

As NASA sets its sights on long-term exploration of the Moon and Mars, the agency is increasing the cadence of its Artemis missions. Helping bring these plans to fruition is Tom Percy, manager of systems engineering and integration for NASA’s Human Landing System Program.

Percy serves as a focal point in working with providers SpaceX and Blue Origin to accelerate and streamline systems designs, manufacturing, testing, and certification. He ensures the crewed landers that SpaceX and Blue Origin are developing for Artemis are designed, built, tested, and will operate with other NASA exploration assets safely and effectively.

“You might say that all human landing system integration work lands on my desk. And with the rest of my talented, hard-working systems engineering and integration team, we’re working to make it all happen,” Percy said.

A native of North Easton, Massachusetts, Percy earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, where he first got hands-on experience working on designs that could be applied to NASA’s sustainable lunar architecture.

“As an undergrad, I served as president of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. To get some real-world engineering experience, we decided to participate in the Great Moonbuggy Race,” Percy said. “Now called the Human Exploration Rover Challenge, the competition is held annually at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

“At the time, I had never heard of Marshall Space Flight Center,” said Percy. “But our student team designed and built a rover and traveled to Huntsville for the race. That’s when I learned about some of the projects in Marshall’s diverse portfolio that the center works for NASA. And that’s when I began planning to make my way to NASA Marshall for my career.”

Percy chose to move south and earn a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His research in the advanced propulsion lab and courses in space systems design culminated in a spacecraft design course and the chance to work directly with engineers at Marshall.

Since landing at Marshall in 2003, Percy has been involved in evaluating transportation architecture options for human deep space exploration, including missions to land astronauts on the Moon and Mars. He also has expertise in space transportation, including advanced propulsion technology development; trajectory analysis; and spacecraft and mission concept development. Percy earned a doctorate in aerospace systems engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

The range of experience comes together in his current role as manager of human landing systems engineering and integration.

“The world watched the amazing success of Artemis II. NASA and our commercial providers are looking forward to flying again soon and executing increasingly complex Artemis missions,” Percy said.

Through the Artemis program, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly complex missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, establish an enduring human presence on the lunar surface, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.

To learn more about the Artemis program, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/artemis

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At the top and bottom of the planet, the seasons arrive on a schedule all their own. Satellite data from a mission measuring infrared energy reveal just how differently—and how dramatically—surface temperatures swing across two full years at the poles.

In this animation, surface temperatures across the Arctic and Antarctic pulse between cold (dark blue) and milder to warm (lighter blue to red). Data for the animation come from NASA’s PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment) satellites. The mission’s twin CubeSats began collecting science data in July 2024 and have now captured two complete seasonal cycles at each pole.

Because the two poles sit in opposite hemispheres, their seasons occur at opposite times—and the swing between seasons differs, too. In the Arctic, cold, dark winters give way to summers warm enough to thaw vast stretches of tundra and sea ice. In Antarctica, Earth’s coldest continent, summer temperatures rarely climb above freezing before the bitter cold of winter returns.

Surface temperatures, and how they fluctuate, offer a window into Earth’s energy budget, the net flow of energy into and out of the Earth system. Sunlight absorbed by the surface is re-radiated as infrared heat, which bounces between Earth’s surface and atmosphere before escaping to space. The poles play an important role in this process. Atmospheric and ocean circulation carries excess heat absorbed in the tropics toward the poles, where it radiates away to space, helping regulate the planet’s temperature.

“By measuring invisible heat radiating from Earth’s coldest places, PREFIRE is helping scientists understand why the poles are changing so rapidly, and what those changes might mean for the rest of the planet,” said Chad Greene, a glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Scientists have long known that far-infrared radiation accounts for nearly 60 percent of the energy Earth loses to space, but that portion of the spectrum—invisible to human eyes—had never been comprehensively measured on a global scale. By directly tracking this invisible energy in near-real-time, the PREFIRE mission is helping scientists refine models and gain a better understanding of the Earth system.

“Weather systems, river flows, shipping routes, and ice sheet stability are all influenced by energy movement in a part of the spectrum that only PREFIRE can see,” said Tristan L’Ecuyer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator of the PREFIRE mission. “Now that the invisible has been made visible, we can begin to improve weather and climate predictions that industries, our national defense, and Arctic communities rely on.”

Maps courtesy of Chad Greene, NASA/JPL, using data from NASA’s PREFIRE mission. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

References & Resources

• NASA Earthdata, PREFIRE. Accessed August 5, 2026.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2009) Climate and Earth’s Energy Budget. Accessed August 5, 2026.
• NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2025, August 15) NASA’s PREFIRE CubeSat Mission Extended. Accessed August 5, 2026.
• L’Ecuyer, T.S., et al. (2021) The Polar Radiant Energy in the Far Infrared Experiment. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 102(7).

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