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All of the research happening on Artemis I - including Helga, Zohar, and Moonikin Campos - is meant to prepare for those later missions. Artemis I also sets the groundwork for the next two missions in the Artemis program: Artemis 2 is scheduled to send humans on a similar trip around the moon in 2024, and Artemis 3 will make history by landing the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface sometime in 2025, at the earliest.
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It’s part of NASA’s broader ambitions for lunar exploration, which include astronaut treks across the moon’s surface, a lunar human habitat, and a new space station called Gateway. “It will give NASA a little bit more confidence for crewed missions coming up in the next couple of years.”Īrtemis is the next generation of moon missions. “This is a good demonstration that the rocket works the way it’s supposed to,” Wendy Whitman Cobb, a professor at the US Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, told Recode. Once the vehicle leaves orbit, Orion will travel past the moon, and then thousands of miles beyond it, before turning around and heading back to Earth - a 1.3 million-mile journey that will last 42 days. Now, the agency says the mission could go forward in late September, but it could be delayed until October.Īs soon as NASA does figure out fixes, the Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built, will lift off, carrying the Orion spacecraft on its nose. NASA once again delayed the mission and rescheduled for September 2, because of the fuel system leak. Liftoff was originally scheduled for August 29, but NASA postponed the launch after engineers encountered several issues, including a nearby thunderstorm and problems with chilling one of the rocket’s engines. They’re also just one of several science experiments aboard the mission meant to better our understanding of space travel. While these manikins might not look particularly impressive on their own, they will play a critical role in NASA’s ambitions to build a new pathway to the moon and, eventually, send astronauts to Mars. Helga and Zohar are designed to measure the effects of radiation on women’s bodies in space, and Moonikin Campos will sit in the commander’s seat to track just how bumpy a voyage to the moon might be for future human crew members. They’re high-tech manikins - that’s the term for human models used in scientific research - filled with sensors that will test how the human body responds to space travel. There won’t be any humans on NASA’s big trip, but there will be three astronauts: Helga, Zohar, and Moonikin Campos. While the Artemis I mission won’t land on the lunar surface, the trip itself will be the farthest a vehicle designed for human astronauts has ever traveled into space. NASA has once again delayed its historic Artemis I mission to the moon, after engineers discovered a leak in the rocket’s fuel system.
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