The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Artemis I Mission on November 16, 2022 at 12.17 p.m. IST (1:47:44 am EST and 6:47:44 UTC) from Launch Complex 39B of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The successful launch came after four cancelled attempts due to technical problems and tropical storms Ian and Nicole.
Artemis I (earlier called Exploration Mission-1) is the first in a series of increasingly complex Moon missions since the Apollo project which landed the first humans on the Moon. Artemis I is uncrewed.
The Apollo project took its name from Apollo, a god of Greek mythology associated with music, poetry, archery, sun and light, the god of practically everything. Artemis is Apollo’s twin sister and the goddess of the Moon as well as hunting in Greek mythology.
The Artemis Mission differs from the Apollo programme in that it does not merely aim to land humans on the Moon and bring them back in a short while, but it aims to see if it would be possible to establish bases both in lunar orbit and on the Moon’s surface. The ultimate aim is to allow humans to stay on the Moon for a longer duration as well as assess the potential of the Moon as a launch pad for explorations into deep space, starting with Mars.
The new Artemis Mission should not be confused with NASA’s ARTEMIS mission (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun).
ARTEMIS was made up of two probes: P1 and P2. They were originally part of the successful THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) mission launched in 2007 to orbit the Earth and study the aurora. NASA redirected the two probes to the Moon. Both the spacecrafts arrived in lunar orbit in 2011. The twin orbiters have contributed to lunar and Earth science and have provided data on the solar wind.
Artemis I is the first integrated test of NASA’s deep space exploration systems, namely, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and the ground systems at Kennedy Space Center.
Space Launch System
The SLS rocket is the most powerful and complex rocket built so far. It is the biggest new vertical launch system NASA has built since the Saturn V of the Apollo era. The SLS rocket is designed for missions beyond low-Earth orbit carrying crew or cargo to the Moon and beyond, says NASA.
The rocket is 98 m in height and weighs some 2,500 tonnes. Though not as tall as the Saturn V rocket, its thrust power is 15 per cent more: it has a 39 Meganewtons (8.8 million pounds) of peak thrust at launch. It has the power to help the Orion spacecraft reach speeds of over 36,000 km per hour, and take it directly to the Moon. It has been made powerful enough to send Orion, astronauts, and a large cargo to the Moon on a single mission. The Moon is nearly 1,000 times farther than the position of the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit to which astronauts regularly travel. (The SLS is evolvable; the rocket can be improved with more powerful configurations to suit later missions.)
The rocket has four main sections: the upper stage that sits under Orion; the core stage; the two solid rocket boosters; and the four engines at the bottom of the core stage.
The solid rocket boosters on the SLS will provide more than 75 per cent of the total thrust at launch. The four Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines will power the core stage of the SLS. The core stage stores cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and all the systems that will feed the four RS-25 engines. The interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) provides in-space propulsion after the solid rocket boosters and core stage are jettisoned. After an orbit of the Earth, the ICPS gave Orion the push it required to leave Earth’s orbit and travel toward the Moon after separating from the ICPS. The ICPS was then to deploy a number of CubeSats to perform experiments and technology demonstrations.
Orion
The Orion spacecraft on Artemis 1 is uncrewed. It has a diameter of 16.5 feet and a mass of 25 tonnes. (It is named after Orion which is one of the most recognisable constellations in the sky, while in classical mythology, Orion is the hunting companion of Artemis.)
The Orion has three parts. The Launch Abort System will be able to pull the spacecraft and its crew to safety in case any emergency takes place. The Crew Module, built by the main contractor Lockheed Martin, will transport four crew members beyond the Moon when the spacecraft is crewed. The Service Module will give support to the Crew Module from launch through separation before re-entry. The module is the powerhouse of the spacecraft, supplying the spacecraft with electricity, propulsion, thermal control, air, and water.
The Orion in Artemis Mission 1 will travel 450,000 km to the Moon, where it will fly about 100 km above the lunar surface and then use the Moon’s gravitational force to propel the spacecraft into a new deep retrograde orbit 64,000 km from the Moon. This lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit or DRO is an orbit in which a spacecraft is at a high altitude from the surface of the Moon and travels around the Moon in a direction opposite to that of the Moon orbiting around the Earth. This orbit is very stable “because of its interactions with two points of the planet-moon system where objects tend to stay put, balanced between the gravitational pull of two large masses–in this case the Earth and Moon–which allows a spacecraft to reduce fuel consumption and remain in position while traveling around the Moon,” says NASA. The Orion will stay in that orbit for approximately six days.
After a span of 25 days, 11 hours, 36 minutes from launch, and after travelling a distance of approximately 2.3 million km, Orion will splash down in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of San Diego on December 11, 2022. Orion would have stayed in space longer than any human spacecraft has so far without docking to a space station.
Payloads on the SLS and Orion
On the SLS The CubeSats that flew as secondary payloads on the SLS are as follows:
Lunar IceCube developed by Morehead State University in Kentucky will be searching for water in all forms with an infrared spectrometer during a seven-hour orbit around the Moon.
LunaH-Map (Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper), designed by researchers and students at Arizona State University, will investigate hydrogen abundances in the Moon’s shadowy regions. Its orbit will be centred on the Shackleton Crater, an impact crater at the Moon’s south pole.
LunIR (Lunar Infra Red imaging) is Lockheed Martin’s CubeSat, which will also be making fly-bys of the Moon, mapping its surface.
NEA Scout (Near-Earth Asteroid Scout), a NASA mission from the Marshall Space Flight Center, will travel by solar sail to an NEA and take photographs to determine its physical properties.
CuSP (CubeSat to study Solar Particles) from the Southwest Research Institute will be carried out of Earth’s atmosphere to orbit the Sun after its release; it will study radiation from the Sun, solar winds, and other solar events.
BioSentinel from NASA is the only item that contains a living microorganism, namely, single-called yeast; the yeast will be rehydrated in space to detect, measure, and compare the effects of deep-space radiation on it. The information could potentially protect astronauts from radiation.
Team Miles CubeSat has been made by citizen scientist designers at Miles Space and Fluid & Reason and will use innovative plasma iodine thrusters to travel around 60 million km from Earth on a trajectory towards Mars.
ArgoMoon, proposed by Argotec in Turin, Italy, and approved by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the European Space Agency (ESA), and NASA to fly with Artemis 1, will record images of the ICPS with advanced optics and software imaging system.
OMOTENASHI (Outstanding MOon exploration TEchnologies demonstrated by NAno Semi-Hard Impactor) from Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will eject a nanolander to land on the Moon to measure lunar surface radiation and investigate soil mechanics using accelerometers. (The CubeSat, however, seems to have got lost after detaching.)
EQUULEUS (EQUilibriUm Lunar-Earth point 6U Spacecraft) has been created by the JAXA with assistance from the University of Tokyo with the aim of better understanding the radiation in the space environment around the Earth (from Earth-Moon Lagrange 2 point about 1.5 million km).
The CubeSats carried by the SLS seem to have had a mixed fate. They faced problems, and it was not clear how all of them were faring.
On Orion Though Artemis I is uncrewed, there are three mannequins aboard Orion. One is a full mannequin (Captain Moonikin Campos named after Arturo Campos, a NASA engineer during the Apollo programme, and nicknamed by public vote) featuring two radiation sensors and wearing a first-generation Orion Crew Survival System spacesuit. The seat the man-nequin will be in also has sensors (under the headrest and behind the seat) to record acceleration and vibration during the mission.
Alongside Moonikin are two ‘phantom torsos’, mannequins with just a torso and head, named Helga and Zohar fitted with more than 5,600 passive sensors and 34 active radiation detectors. These are in two of the other seats on Orion as part of the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE). Zohar wears a radiation-shielding vest called AstroRad. Data will be collected on radiation levels during missions to the Moon while testing the effectiveness of the vest.
Orion also carries a doll of NASA’s Snoopy and a Shaun the Sheep toy representing the contribution of ESA’s European Service Module to the mission. They are zero gravity indicators, i.e., when Snoopy or Shaun starts to float in the air, it means Artemis has reached the weightlessness of microgravity. (Snoopy is the beagle created by cartoonist Charles Schulz in 1950. In May 1969, the Apollo 10 module was named Snoopy, and the command module was nicknamed Charlie Brown after the dog’s cartoon owner. The Apollo 10 module ‘snooped’ around the Moon to check out the proposed landing site for the Apollo 11 mission.)
Also on Artemis I are commemorative stickers, seeds, and flags from contractors and space agencies from around the world. There is Callisto, a technology demonstration, named after the Greek goddess and one of Artemis’ hunting attendants, and developed by Lockheed Martin in collaboration with Amazon and Cisco. It will demonstrate how astronauts and flight controllers can use human-machine interface technology to simplify their jobs simpler, and make it safer and more efficient, something that will advance exploration of deep space. It will use video conferencing software to communicate audio and video from mission control, and will test Alexa, Amazon’s voice-based virtual assistant, to respond to the transmitted audio messages.
Purpose of Artemis I
NASA considers the Artemis I mission to be a ‘short-class’ mission as against missions of up to 42 days which was it original aim in two earlier launch attempts which, however, failed. The 25-day mission is expected to achieve all the test objectives, though within a much shorter timeframe.
According to NASA, the unmanned Artemis I mission is intended to test the SLS and the Orion capsule, to demonstrate the performance, and gather engineering data of the two, for astronauts would be riding them on future missions. The flight would demonstrate Orion’s systems in a spaceflight environment and ensure a safe re-entry, descent, splashdown, and recovery prior to the first flight with crew on Artemis II.
NASA is testing the effects of the trip on the three mannequins built as models for real human astronauts.
A crucial part of the mission will be to test the performance of Orion’s heat shield as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 39,400 km per hour (which is much faster than the re-entries from the space station), and being heated up to nearly 2,760 degrees Celsius, which is about half the temperature of the surface of the Sun.
The mission will also provide an opportunity to demonstrate Orion’s parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
About the Artemis Mission
Artemis is NASA’s new lunar exploration programme, seeking to establish an ongoing human presence on the Moon. The mission also aims at landing the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon to signify equality.
Through the Artemis missions, NASA will use new technology to study the Moon in new and better ways. The astronauts will explore the surface of the Moon and carry out intensive scientific research on the lunar surface. It is more science-driven than the Apollo programme that put 12 NASA astronauts on the Moon during six missions from 1969 to 1972.
The major components of the Artemis mission are the SLS, the Orion spacecraft, the Lunar Gateway, and human landing systems. The SLS is the powerful launching system for the spacecraft. The Orion spacecraft, equipped with life support systems and shuttle interfaces, is the command module required to transport the astronauts through space. The Lunar Gateway will be a small space station orbiting the Moon to be assembled and built by the time of the launch of Artemis III. It will serve as a temporary platform where astronauts can be accommodated and can carry out their research. The human landing systems will transport cargo and astronauts from the Lunar Gateway to the Moon’s surface.
The Artemis Mission is the primary effort of NASA, but several other agencies have provided their input. For example, the ESA, the JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) have worked together in order to contribute to the Artemis Mission. The Artemis programme will also enlist commercial partners such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The outcome of the uncrewed Artemis I and the knowledge gained from it will help in the two further missions in line.
Artemis II will be the first crewed flight with four astronauts on a 10-day mission, when they will set a record for the farthest human travel beyond the Moon. After being launched by the SLS, the crew will fly the Orion module 7,402 km beyond the far side of the Moon and complete a lunar fly-by before returning to the Earth. The mission will collect valuable flight test data.
Artemis III will see Orion and its four-astronaut crew travelling to the Moon and land on the surface. It will be the first Moon landing since the last Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972. Building on what is learnt from the Artemis II mission, four astronauts on the Orion module will dock with the Lunar Gateway (not yet built, but expected to be assembled in stages and to be completed by the time Artemis III is launched) and remain in space for 30 days. The human landing system will then take two of the astronauts down to the Moon’s South Pole, a region of the Moon that humans have so far not visited. The astronauts will spend a week exploring the lunar surface and perform scientific studies, including sampling water ice. They will learn how to live and work on the surface of another celestial body and use and test the technologies to study the Moon in new and better ways, and prepare for human missions to Mars.
NASA has said that Artemis III will see the first woman landing on the Moon. It also said that it would land the first person of colour on the Moon, either on Artemis III or on a future mission.
Although NASA is currently focusing on these three missions, more such projects are being planned.
NASA’s long-term goals are ambitious, the intention being to use the technology and research developed during the Artemis flights to launch a future crewed mission to Mars. This ‘Moon to Mars’ plan involves building a new space station in lunar orbit and, eventually, a habitable Moon base. The Moon would become a stepping-stone for a human mission to Mars.
The Artemis Accords
The Artemis Missions have been planned in accordance with the principles put forward in the Artemis Accord.
Numerous countries and private-sector players are conducting missions and operations in cislunar space (the space between the Earth and the Moon). As such, it is necessary to have a common set of principles to govern the civil exploration and use of outer space. The Artemis Accords were initiated by NASA to establish some common principles, guidelines, and best practices applicable to the entire lunar exploration programme. These accords are signed on a voluntary basis on a national rather than an organisational level. Members of the Artemis Accords were announced by NASA and the American State Department in 2020. More than 20 countries had signed the accords by 2022.
The accords give a set of agreements that present a framework for the exploration of the Moon and beyond. They incorporate several principles of space law, and are in in accordance with the norms of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. NASA and the other nations subscribing to the Artemis Accords are bound by the pact to carry out peaceful space exploration.
Outer Space Treaty
The Outer Space Treaty (OST) of 1967 was based on the ‘Declaration of Legal Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space’, which had been adopted by the General Assembly in its Resolution 1962 on October 18, 1963. It provides the basic framework on international space law, including the following principles:
- The exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind.
- Outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States.
- Outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
- States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner.
- The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.
- Astronauts shall be regarded as the envoys of mankind.
- States shall be responsible for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities.
- States shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects.
- States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.
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