GoKawiilFour people are on their way to the Moon — for the first time since Apollo astronauts stepped off the lunar surface more than 50 years ago. They launched successfully this evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on NASA’s Artemis II mission, and, if everything goes to plan, they will travel farther from Earth than any human has before.
“Humanity’s next great voyage begins,” said NASA launch commentator Derrol Nail as the rocket cleared the launch tower.
The astronauts will now orbit Earth for about 24 hours to perform checks on their spacecraft, and then fire their rocket engines to set them on course for the Moon. The voyage there will take three days, the lunar surface growing ever larger in the capsule’s windows as they approach. On arrival, they will slingshot around the Moon’s far side, glimpsing lunar regions no human has ever seen by eye, and then make the three-day journey back home (see ‘Artemis II trajectory’).
Jasiek Krzysztofiak/Nature
Artemis II is the second in a series of US missions aiming to put humans back on the Moon, before China does. The goal of this flight is to test how well the Orion capsule, which is around the size of a small camper-van, keeps the astronauts safe as they travel beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field and through the radiation-heavy environment of deep space (see ‘Orion spacecraft’).
“Artemis II is absolutely critical in that pathway of getting back to the lunar surface,” says Gordon Osinski, a planetary scientist at Western University in London, Canada.
On their journey, the Artemis II astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency — will conduct a range of scientific experiments, including studying how space flight affects human health, and observing the lunar surface in unprecedented detail. Glover will become the first person of colour, Koch the first woman and Hansen the first non-American to travel beyond Earth orbit.
The flight is analogous to 1968’s Apollo 8 mission, in which three astronauts flew around the Moon in preparation for later Moon landings. The Artemis missions were named after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology, who was associated with the Moon.
Most of the scientists and engineers working on Artemis “were not around during Apollo”, says Juliane Gross, a lunar scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, who is on the mission’s science team. “I’m so excited about this.”
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