SPACE — The American Space Agency (NASA) is preparing to unveil four crew members who will carry out the Artemis II mission. Artemis is NASA’s program to send humans back to the Moon.
Reported from Daily Sabah, a crew of four consisting of three Americans and a Canadian for the mission to circumnavigate Bulab. The Artemis II mission is slated to launch in early 2024. It will be the first manned mission around the moon since the end of the Apollo era more than 50 years ago.
The newly selected crew is the first Canadian astronaut for a moon mission and three Americans from a group of 18 NASA astronauts. This group of NASA astronauts consists of nine women and nine men who were selected for the Artemis program in 2020.
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The Artemis astronaut group is a mixture of veteran and newcomer astronauts who are also selected for diversity. As a result, the Artemis II crew announced later will likely include the first woman and the first person of color assigned to a lunar mission.
The Artemis I mission was completed in December 2022. This mission included the maiden launch of NASA’s most powerful mega-rocket and the newly built Orion spacecraft in an unmanned test flight that lasted 25 days.
Meanwhile, the Artemis II flight mission is a 10-day journey of 2.3 million kilometers around the moon and back to Earth. This mission aims to demonstrate that all of Orion’s life support equipment and other systems will operate as designed with astronauts in space. This flight is targeted as early as 2024.
According to the plan, Artemis II will explore about 10,300 kilometers beyond the far side of the moon before returning. If successful, it will be the closest humans have made passages to the Moon since Apollo 17. Apollo 17 brought Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt to the lunar surface in December 1972.
At its farthest distance from Earth, Artemis II is thought to be more than 370,000 kilometers away. For information, the height of the International Space Station is about 420 kilometers above Earth.
If Artemis II is successful, NASA plans to follow up a few years later with the first astronaut landing program on the moon. One of them was a woman on the Artemis III mission.
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