Artemis 1 Mission

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

NASA’s Orion capsule splashed down back to Earth on Sunday, December 11. The Orion’s landing in the Pacific Ocean marked the end of the inaugural Artemis 1 lunar mission exactly 50 years after Apollo’s final moon landing.

• The gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, carrying a simulated crew of three mannequins wired with sensors”, landed in the Pacific Ocean, off Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. 
• It also performed a new landing technique called ‘skip entry’, designed to help the spacecraft accurately splash down at the landing site. 
• Orion entered the Earth’s upper atmosphere and used the atmosphere and its lift to “skip” back outside the atmosphere only to re-enter once again.

What is the Artemis 1 Mission?

• Artemis 1 was essentially an experimental mission, to check if the capsule can be trusted to ferry humans to the moon and back in future missions. Thus, safe re-entry was critical to the success of the whole initiative.
• Named after the sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, it is NASA’s successor to the Apollo lunar missions from fifty years ago.
• Artemis I is the first in a series of increasingly complex missions to build a long-term human presence at the Moon for decades to come.
• The primary goals for Artemis I are to 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.
• It is only a lunar Orbiter mission even though, unlike most Orbiter missions, it has a return-to-Earth target.
• Artemis I is the first step into that new space age of achieving the promise of transporting humans to new worlds, of landing and living on other planets, or maybe meeting aliens.
• As it hurtled towards Earth, Orion experienced such friction and pressure that its forward-facing surface could have generated temperatures likely to reach around 3,000C. 
• It’s essentially like throwing a football 300 yards and hitting a penny Eric Coffman, Orion propulsion senior manager at Lockheed Martin Corp, which built Orion under contract with NASA.

Aims of Artemis 1

• Artemis 1 is being seen by NASA as a stepping stone to much greater things.
• It is the first in a series of missions that are planned to not only take humans back to the Moon, but to also explore the possibilities of extended stay there, and to investigate the potential to use the Moon as a launch pad for deep space explorations.

Artemis II

• It will take off in 2024.
• Artemis II will have a crew aboard Orion and will be a test mission to confirm that all of the spacecraft’s systems will operate as designed when it has humans on board.
• But the Artemis II launch will be similar to that of Artemis I. A crew of four astronauts will be aboard Orion as it and ICPS orbit the Earth twice before moving to the direction of the Moon.

Artemis III

• It is scheduled for 2025, and is expected to ferry astronauts to the moon for the first time since the apollo missions.

Question: What is the Artemis Mission? How it will help human in space exploration.