BACK TO THE MOON WITH

THE NEXT ARTEMIS MISSION

The great return of man to the Moon is soon underway: Monday, August 29, 2022 must take off the Artemis mission of the new American lunar program. Artemis is a program of NASA, the American Space Agency, which collaborates with the European Space Agency, the space agencies of Canada and Japan, as well as several commercial partners (Airbus and Lockheed Martin, in particular).

The take-off of Artémis 1 is scheduled for Monday August 29, 2022. The NASA mission must last 42 days in total. It's a trip to the Moon, but without an astronaut on board (that will be for Artemis 3). Meticulously choreographed, it should make it possible to collect spectacular images as well as valuable scientific data.

SLS, like Space Launch System, is NASA's new giant rocket. With its 70 tons and almost 100 meters high, it will be the most powerful launcher ever built, surpassing the emblematic Saturn V which carried 24 American astronauts to the Moon between 1968 and 1972. It will make its first flight from the Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Its four RS-25 engines, and two white boosters on each side, will produce 39 meganewtons of thrust - 15% more than the Apollo program's Saturn V rocket.

After two minutes, the thrusters will fall back into the Atlantic Ocean. After eight minutes, the main stage (orange in color) will detach in turn. There will then only be the Orion spacecraft, whose solar panels will then be deployed, attached to the upper stage of the rocket (ICPS). After circling the Earth, the latter will provide the final push that will place Orion on the Moon's trajectory, approximately 1.5 hours after takeoff - before also being released.

The journey, without an astronaut, of the Orion capsule

The ship will then only consist of the capsule where the astronauts will be in the future, powered by a service module built by the European Space Agency (ESA). It will take several days to reach the Moon, which it will approach on arrival at only 100 km. The Orion capsule will go up to 64,000 km behind the Moon - a record for a habitable capsule.

But initially, an empty Orion ship will be launched by the SLS to test all the stages of the mission. It will remain in orbit around the Moon for several days to allow NASA engineers to verify its performance.

Orion's "passengers"

The capsule will carry a dummy called Moonikin Campos, installed in the commander's seat and dressed in the new NASA suit. It will record the acceleration and the vibrations undergone. Also on board: two busts of women, named Helga and Zohar, and made of materials imitating bones or even human organs. One will be wearing a radiation jacket, the other will not. Sensors will make it possible to evaluate the levels of radiation received, in particular in deep space, where they are much more important.

If this dress rehearsal is successful, a first crewed flight will follow during the Artemis II mission, currently scheduled for mid-2024. Like their Apollo 8 predecessors, the mission's four astronauts will fly over the Moon but not land on it. We will therefore have to wait for Artemis III to see the real return of a crew to the surface of our satellite. After leaving Orion to land aboard the HLS (Human Landing System), two astronauts, including the first woman to walk on the Moon, will spend nearly a week on the surface, more than double the record set during the Apollo missions. . Scheduled for 2025, the mission could however experience several years of delay according to the latest report from NASA's Inspector General.

Goal Mars

The objective of the whole program is to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon, which will go through an essential stage: the construction of the Deep Space Gateway (DSG) , a space station hosting a habitation module around the Moon, capable of accommodating crews for a period of 42 days. The space station, the Gateway, will be assembled in orbit around the Moon from the end of 2024. Much smaller than the International Space Station (ISS), it will rely on a similar partnership between American, European and Japanese space agencies. and Canadian, but this time without Russia.

The Gateway is one of the big differences between the Artemis and Apollo programs. By offering a transit point and a place of experimentation between the Earth and the Moon, it is presented as an ingredient for the sustainability of the return to the Moon, the motivations of which today are less geopolitical than economic. The Artemis agreements, which France has just joined, for example explicitly provide for the possibility of extracting resources from the Moon (such as helium 3, essential for the nuclear fusion reactors of the future, or rare earths useful for the manufacture new technology...).

In the longer term, the idea behind the Artemis program is to reuse the developments made for a first trip to the planet Mars by 2040., confirms these indirect objectives that the Artemis mission is preparing: