NASA’s flagship Artemis I mission is about to fly past the moon

There is a person by the name ofLeah Crane.

NASA's Artemis I will fly within 130 kilometres of the far side of the moon at 12:44 pm today, before entering retrograde motion on Monday.

On November 16th, the most powerful rocket ever launched, the SLS, was blasted off with the capsule. After years of delays and several missed launch opportunities this year, the liftoff of the SLS rocket went amazingly smoothly, despite the fact that it was damaged by a Hurricane.

Laura Forczyk is a space analyst. There were small hitch, but it didn't explode! It is extremely rare to see anyone working on rocket hardware so close to liftoff, and the biggest of those small hitch was a set of loose bolts that a team was sent out to tighten.

The moon is expected to be entered around the 25th ofNovember. It is a part of the mission that is just as important as the launch itself. It's expected to come back to Earth on 11 December.

NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen told New Scientist that getting off the Earth will be more difficult than returning to the moon. The mission is only over once it is safe to do so. The goal of the Artemis II mission is to put humans on board, but only if it is safe.

NASA will have to be more cautious. Emily Judd is a researcher at NASA's Langley Research Center. We need oxygen to breathe, we need food, we need life support systems, so we have to make sure that everything is ready for Artemis II.

The main purpose of Artemis I is to test the SLS and Orion spacecraft ahead of Artemis II, which will see a crewed Orion perform a lunar flyby. The ten small satellites were released hours after the launch.

A Japanese experiment called Omotenashi is intended to perform a soft landing on the moon. This would make Japan the fourth nation to do so. It is possible that Omotenashi will not be able to land because it is tumbling in space.

Three of the cubesats are intended to study radiation in space, one called NEA Scout will fly via solar sail to a nearby asteroid, and the other two are technology demonstrations. Five of the ten cubesats are currently functioning as expected, while the other five are experiencing technology issues or are unable to communicate with their operators on Earth, according to a NASA press conference on 18 November.

The Artemis III mission is intended to bring astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972 in order to inform future scientific study. We have barely touched the surface of what we can learn about the moon and how we can survive on Mars. The moon is the starting point for the solar system.

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