How NASA’s LRO data is preparing astronauts for Artemis

When astronauts launch a trip around the Moon in 2024 with the shipment NASA’s Artemis II will begin to learn about the lunar landmarks gathered by one of the Agency’s premiere robotic missions to our nearest cosmic neighbor.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched in 2009, has returned a wealth of scientific data in its fourteen years of operation, but that’s not the only benefit it can provide. With “identification” right in the name, it should come as no surprise that this mission was designed from the ground up with the idea of ​​aiding manned spaceflight.

As astronauts prepare to return to the Moon for the first time since 1972, they have been trained in how to spot landmarks, geological features and help mark areas of interest for future landings using data collected by LRO. This training included science visualization using LRO data to highlight features that would be seen from orbit.

According to Kelsey Young of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, this was built into the LRO mission’s operations from the start. “The mission was originally funded and the instruments were selected not only to meet the goals of the Science Mission Directorate, but also those of the human spaceflight program,” says Young, head of Flight Science Operations for the upcoming Artemis missions. “The instruments were chosen in part because they serve both science and exploration.”

To that end, the four astronauts selected for the next trip to the Moon went through a week-long course on how to recognize lunar landmarks from orbit. The course featured data from the LRO, which was used to visualize the lessons learned by the astronauts. As a milestone in their courses, the astronauts were tasked with identifying areas of interest for potential landings from a selection of orbital images.

This type of training is vital not only for Artemis II, but for all subsequent trips to the Moon as part of the Artemis program. As noted by Ernie Wright of Goddard’s Optical Science Studio, LRO has provided us with the best global mapping of the shape of any planetary body in the Solar System. This includes Earth, where oceans and polar ice cover prevent similar high-resolution mapping of rock surfaces.

“With the Moon, we can do all these things globally, and one of the reasons LRO was launched was to find a place that would be interesting to send astronauts to,” says Wright, who has been working with LRO data for the entire space . lifetime of the shipment.

Jacob Richardson, a researcher in Goddard’s planetary science group who also participated in the Artemis II astronaut training program, noted that human eyes and the human mind can observe things and make inferences in fractions of a second better than even the most advanced robotic detector.

Of the lesson to the Artemis II astronauts, Richardson says hardly an hour went by where they weren’t using data and images from LRO. “One of the things we did was show them scientific examples of what they would see from their orbit,” he says.

That way, when astronauts fly by the Moon next year, they’ll be prepared by knowing what they’ll be able to see, how those features relate to each other, and how to look for things that might interest astronauts landing on the moon. lunar surface in future missions.

He points out how, as early as the later Apollo missions, our knowledge of lunar surface features was limited by the technology available at the time. “When we went to the Moon with Apollo, we had incredible success, especially for an early space-age mission,” he says. “But we did this with very limited information about what the surface actually looked like. Even for Apollo 16, we thought they were landing on lava flows, and that didn’t happen.”

Fourteen-plus years of images and data collected by LRO ensure that astronauts returning to the Moon are fully prepared for a successful mission of exploration and discovery as part of NASA’s ongoing mission to explore Earth’s nearest neighbor.