“We will”. That’s the slogan NASA is using in preparation for the maiden flight of its new lunar rocket, which was due to launch on Monday (29) but was delayed after an engine failure. The phrase is repeated by agency officials, added as a hashtag in social media posts and proclaimed on banners hanging from the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
If you’re not a space aficionado, sending astronauts back to the moon might seem like sheer nonsense.
For what? We’ve been there. Why is NASA going to repeat what it did half a century ago, especially since astronauts won’t step on the moon for several years, and by that time NASA will have spent about $100 billion?
NASA directors now claim that lunar missions are vital to the human spaceflight program, not a simple repeat of the Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972.
“It’s a future where NASA lands the first woman and the first person of color on the moon,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told a news conference this month. “And on these increasingly complex missions, astronauts will live and work in deep space and develop the science and technology to send the first humans to Mars.”
That’s a change from 2010, when President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the site where Americans were launched to the moon and said NASA should aim for more ambitious destinations like asteroids and Mars and go beyond the moon.
“We’ve been there,” Obama said.
The current program was called Artemis by NASA leaders during the Trump administration. In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo. The first step in the program will be the next test flight of the lunar rocket, known as the Space Launch System, with the Orion capsule at the top, where astronauts will sit on future missions. This unmanned flight, during which Orion will circle the moon before returning to Earth, is to resolve any issues with the spacecraft before putting people on board.
After failing to launch the rocket on Monday, NASA must try again on Friday (2) or Monday (5). Meteorologists predicted on Saturday (27) a 70% probability of favorable weather for the launch.
In addition to the mission’s role as a testing ground for the technologies needed for a much longer trip to Mars, NASA also hopes to boost companies that want to build a steady business of bringing scientific instruments and other payloads to the moon, and inspiring students to get on board. in the fields of science and engineering.
“We explore because it’s part of our nature,” Nelson said.
It’s not just NASA that wants to go to the moon these days. In recent years, China has successfully landed three robotic missions on the satellite. India and an Israeli nonprofit also sent landing units in 2019, though both crashed. A South Korean orbiter is on its way.
Nelson said China’s growing space ambitions, which include a moon base in the 2030s, also motivated Artemis. “We have to worry about them saying, ‘This is our exclusive zone. You stay out,'” he said. “Yes, that’s one of the things we evaluate.”
For scientists, the renewed focus on the moon promises an abundance of new data in the years to come.
Rocks collected by astronauts during the Apollo missions changed planetary scientists’ understanding of the solar system. Radioactive isotope analysis has provided accurate dating of various regions of the lunar surface. The rocks also revealed a surprising origin story for the satellite: it appears to have formed from debris ejected into space when a Mars-sized object collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago.
But for two decades after the last Apollo 17 landing, NASA turned its attention away from the moon, which to many appeared to be a desolate, dry and airless world. She shifted her focus to other places in the solar system, such as Mars and the multitude of moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Scientific interest in the moon never completely disappeared, however. In fact, its desolate nature means that rocks that hardened billions of years ago remain in almost pristine condition.
“As scientists, we understand that the moon is, in a sense, a Rosetta stone,” said David A. Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute near Houston, Texas. “It’s the best place in the solar system to study the origin and evolution of planets.”
Scientists have also discovered that the moon is not as dry as they thought.
Water, frozen at the bottom of eternally dark craters at the poles, is a valuable resource. It can provide drinking water for future astronauts visiting the moon, and the water can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen.
Oxygen could provide breathable air; oxygen and hydrogen could be used as rocket boosters. Thus, the moon, or a refueling station in orbit around it, could serve as a stopover for spacecraft to refuel their tanks before heading through the solar system.
Ices, if they are ancient accumulations of several billion years, could even provide a book on the scientific history of the solar system.
Growing knowledge of ice has generated renewed interest in the moon. In the early 2000s, Anthony Colaprete, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., said he thought about the moon “only once in a while.”
So NASA put out a bid for proposals for a spacecraft that could accompany the next Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. Colaprete, who at the time was mainly involved with climate models of Mars, proposed the Lunar Crater Detection and Observation Satellite (LCROSS), which he thought could confirm hints of water ice that had been detected by some spacecraft. moons in the 1990s.
LCROSS would direct the upper stage of the launch rocket into one of the polar craters at 9,000 km/h, and then a small follow-up spacecraft would measure the material lifted by the impact.
“It was a pretty crude sampling method,” Colaprete said.
But NASA liked the idea and chose it. In June 2009, the rocket carrying the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and LCROSS was launched. In October, LCROSS made its death dive into Cabeus Crater, near the moon’s south pole.
A month later, Colaprete had his answer: there was water at the bottom of Cabeus, and plenty of it.
Instruments from India’s Chandrayaan-1 orbiter have also found unmistakable signs of water, and scientists using cutting-edge techniques have found water trapped in minerals in ancient rocks from the Apollo 15 and 17 missions.
Barbara Cohen, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said scientists still have many unanswered questions.
There are cold regions with ice, but also cold regions that seem to have no ice. Some places are icy on the surface and others have ice below the surface, but the two regions don’t always overlap. “We don’t fully understand when or how that water got there,” she said.
That means scientists also don’t know how much water there is or how easy it will be to extract it from the surrounding rock and soil.
Colaprete is still working on the moon as well. “The community has grown over the last two decades,” he said. Now he is the principal investigator for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover robotic rover, which is expected to land near the lunar south pole in late 2024 and venture into some of the dark craters for a closer look, including drilling a meter into the ground.
“One of our main goals is to understand the origin and forms of water on the moon,” said Colaprete.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
