US space agency NASA is ready to blast off the Artemis 1 into deep space, kickstarting its renewed moon missions since the Apollo flights five decades before.
The Artemis 1 will go an un-crewed journey to the moon, enabling NASA to test all its capabilities to the limit. The flight will pave the way for Artemis 2 – a crewed mission around the moon and Artemis 3 – a crewed mission that will put the first woman on the moon. And from there on the sky is the limit – NASA will set its sight on building a moon base that could serve as a launchpad for further space missions to Mars and beyond.
While the subsequent missions may sound more exciting, Artemis 1 is the stepping stone for them all. It has certain ambitious targets to meet to check off all the objectives planned for the unscrewed mission.
While Artemis 1 has been delayed by years and has shot up the budget by billions, NASA is prepared to take risks with this test flight and see what it can endure so that upcoming planned missions that take humans to space and then the moon will minimise the chance that anything can go wrong.
The agency is ready to push the mission to extremes that may even bring about failures that would not be acceptable with humans on board.
Flight plan
The Orion spacecraft will be launched on Monday from Kennedy space centre in Florida. Space Launch System or SLS, which is the most powerful rocket ever built, will leave the ground for the first time on its maiden mission and put Orion safely out of earth’s gravitational pull.
The rocket’s four RS-25 engines have two white boosters on either side and will produce 8.8 million pounds of thrust. After 2 minutes of flight, the thrusters will fall back into the Atlantic Ocean. After 8minutes of flight, the core stage (orange in colour) will fall away.
The Orion spacecraft will then be powered by the interim cryogenic propulsion stage which will circle the Earth once, put Orion on course for the Moon, and drop away. Ninety minutes after takeoff, Orion will be making its solitary journey to the moon.
What’s on board?
Well, the journey is not entirely solitary. Amazon’s Alexa is one of the passengers on board the Orion spacecraft and will assist with a technology demonstration called Callisto that could help astronauts stay connected to earth and informed real-time to improve situational awareness on space missions.
Three more dummies are part of the mission. One called ‘Moonikin Campos’ will be equipped with sensors to record acceleration and vibrations. Its companion dummies Helga and Zohar are constitutes like humans with materials that mimic bones and organs. One will wear a radiation vest, the other won’t to test impact of the radiation in deep space.
Primary objectives
The mission’s primary objective is to test the capsule’s heat shield which is what withstands the intense friction of the atmosphere that generally burns up rocks and debris that fly into the earth. The heat shield for Orion is the largest ever built – it is five meters in diameter.
The spacecraft will be travelling at 25,000 miles per hour when it enters the earth and a series of parachutes will slow it down to 20 miles per hour before splashdown in the Pacific. During the entry into the earth’s atmosphere, the shuttle will have to bear temperatures that are 2760 degrees Celsius.
Artemis 1 will also carry a set of 10 cubesats. These are relatively small satellites that are now being deployed into space after serving the earth for observational, telecommunications and other purposes. The cubesats will foray onward to study the sun, the moon and even near-earth asteroids.
These shoebox sized satellites may be little but can have big impact on science.
