“The Apollo programme completely revolutionized our understanding of lunar science and of the Moon itself.” Gearing up to goĪrtemis got its official start in 2017, when former president Donald Trump signed a space-policy directive telling NASA to focus on sending astronauts to the Moon. “Think of it as building upon Apollo,” Weber says. By finding these volatile substances and studying them, scientists can gain insights into the origin and evolution of the Moon, as well as into the broader history of the Solar System, including Earth 1. They might contain ice and other compounds that are rare on the mostly bone-dry Moon. Because sunlight never reaches parts of the south pole, some areas could have been frozen for billions of years. The lunar south pole has never been explored by people or landers (although several robotic missions aim to get there before Artemis astronauts). These six countries are about to go to the Moon - here’s why
NASA SPACE SHUTTLE LANDING SCHEDULE SERIES
To support the Artemis programme, NASA has contracted companies to send a series of robotic landers to the Moon, which will carry NASA-funded instruments to explore its surface and enhance the science that could come from astronaut missions. NASA hopes to achieve its next giant goal, of landing astronauts at the lunar south pole, by the end of 2025. That mission, dubbed Artemis 1, will fly without any crew around the Moon and back on a trip lasting between 26 and 42 days. NASA aims to kick off the Artemis era later this year, with the first launch of its mega-rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS).
The upcoming push is called Artemis, after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology. NASA plans to use it to send crews back to the lunar surface, more than 50 years after US astronauts last walked there during the Apollo programme. “That thing is going to the Moon,” she thought.Īnd unlike any rocket in the past half-century, that thing is going to carry people to the Moon. Like many space enthusiasts around the world, Renee Weber, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, stared in awe at the webcast feed. That evening, an enormous wheeled platform rolled slowly out of the building, carrying the mega-rocket through the coastal night towards its launch pad.
There, in NASA’s biggest building, stood its newest rocket - the most powerful ever built and nearly 100 metres tall. On the morning of 17 March, the world’s largest set of doors rolled open to reveal an aerospace marvel at the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida.
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