Artemis 1 heads to the Moon
Source: By The Indian Express
NASA’s giant Moon rocket lifted off on its debut flight on 16 November 2022, heralding an exciting new phase of deep space exploration a half century after the six Apollo human Moon landings between 1969 and 1972.
The Orion space capsule that sits atop the 32-storey Space Launch System (SLS) vehicle will complete a 25-day lunar Orbiter mission before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on 11 December 2022. The liftoff on 16 November 2022 came after two scheduled launches on 29 August and 3 September were scrubbed following the detection of technical issues during the countdown.
The mission, known as Artemis 1, is unmanned, but headed to the Moon on board Orion are three dummies that mimic astronauts — with the intention of carrying out tests ahead of future manned missions to the Moon and beyond.
But humans went to the Moon 50 years ago, so what’s new?
Although the objective is to ensure the return of humans to the Moon, the Artemis missions — named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister — are going to be qualitatively very different from the Apollo missions of 50 years ago.
The Moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s were guided by Cold War geo-political considerations, and the desire of the United States to go one up on the Soviet Union — which had scored by launching the first satellite, Sputnik, and the first spacecraft, Luna 2, to crash on to the lunar surface, and sending the first man to space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
So President John F Kennedy made a public announcement in 1961 that the US would put a man on the Moon before the decade was out. That deadline was met, thanks to a massive mobilisation of resources towards that end. But the technology ecosystem wasn’t fully ready yet to fully realise the potential of that monumental scientific breakthrough — and the astronauts who landed on the Moon could do little more than bring back samples to Earth for investigations.
Where is the current status of human space exploration?
Since the Apollo missions of 50 years ago, there has been massive progress in space exploration. Spacecraft have travelled beyond the solar system and exploratory missions have probed Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. More than 500 astronauts have travelled to space and back, and permanent space labs like the International Space Station (ISS) and China’s Tiangong space station have been set up.
However, there are several unfulfilled promises — including the possibility of landing, and living, on other planets, and perhaps encountering alien life forms in deep space. It is these promises that the new age of space exploration seeks to fulfill.
And what will Artemis do to fulfill those promises?
While on the face of it, Artemis 1 has fairly humble mission objectives — it is technically only a lunar Orbiter mission with no astronauts on board — it is a stepping stone to much greater things.
It is the first in a series of missions that are planned to not only take humans back to the Moon, but to also explore the possibilities of extended stay there, and to investigate the potential to use the Moon as a launch pad for deep space explorations.
The Artemis missions will build on the existing achievements of space technologies over the past few decades, and lay the foundations for more complex and ambitious missions in the future.
It will work towards extracting the resources found on the Moon, build from the materials available there, and harness hydrogen or helium as energy source. Not all of this will happen with the first mission itself, but these things are distinctly possible now, making human landings on the Moon much more meaningful than earlier.
What is the Artemis 1 mission carrying to the Moon?
It is carrying several payloads in the form of small satellites called CubeSats, each of which is equipped with instruments meant for specific investigations and experiments. The focus of these investigations is to explore long-term stays of human beings in space, and on the Moon.
One CubeSat will search for water in all its forms another will map the availability of hydrogen that can be utilised as a source of energy. Then there are biology experiments, investigating the behaviour of small organisms like fungi and algae in outer space, and the effect of radiation, especially the reaction on their genes.
The Orion spacecraft is specifically designed to carry astronauts into deep space on future missions. NASA hopes to establish a base on the Moon, and to send astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s. The three dummy ‘passengers’ are mannequins made of material that mimic human bones, skin, and soft tissue. These are equipped with a host of sensors to record the various impacts of deep-space atmosphere on the human body.
What about the rocket itself?
The SLS rocket is the most powerful ever built, more powerful than the Saturn V rockets that had taken the Apollo missions to the Moon.
The 98-metre-tall vehicle, weighing 2,500 tonnes, can help the Orion spacecraft achieve speeds of over 36,000 km per hour, and take it directly to the Moon, which is 1,000 times farther than the International Space Station that sees a regular traffic of astronauts.
The planned duration of the Artemis 1 mission is 25 days, 11 hours, and 36 minutes. The Orion capsule will travel a total distance of 1.3 miIlion miles, re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 mph and splashing down on December 11.
