Artemis, Perseverance and Ingenuity
Moon, Mars and Man!
In one of my previous articles on space exploration, I wagered that humans will land on the moon again in this decade. Also, I was quite emphatic about the fact that a lot of progress will be made towards arrival of humans on Mars from earth. We’re getting closer each day.
NASA — the US space agency (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) under its Artemis program is billed to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024.
With the Artemis program, NASA will land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before. We will collaborate with our commercial and international partners and establish sustainable exploration by the end of the decade. Then, we will use what we learn on and around the Moon to take the next giant leap — sending astronauts to Mars.
— NASA
Such bold plans of course ride on the wings of years of preparation and capacity building that have yielded and are still yielding good results.
Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken who were on the SpaceX Demo-2 mission that was concluded with their arrival on 2nd August 2020 according to schedule said they had been preparing for the mission for about 5 years. Five-whole-years! So, it is very easy to imagine the kind of preparation that is going on for the Artemis program.
What is Artemis?
The name Artemis comes from the ancient Greek history. Artemis was a greek goddess and the sister of Apollo. Therein likes the connection.
So, if the Apollo program landed the first man on the moon, then the next mission which is expected to land the first woman on the moon can easily be named Artemis. It is so named.
Under the Artemis program, it is expected that some physical structures will be set up on the moon to enable further studies and deeper exploration of the lunar surfaces.
We will build sustainable elements on and around the Moon that allow our robots and astronauts to explore more and conduct more science than ever before.
— NASA
Mars 2020 Perseverance
Apart from the Artemis mission, there is an autonomous vehicle currently on its way to Mars. It left the earth aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. This vehicle is named Perseverance. The name was suggested by a 13 year old boy in Virginia USA during a school competition set up to find a name for the rover.
The Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance, is based on the Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover configuration. It is car-sized, about 10 feet long (not including the arm), 9 feet wide, and 7 feet tall (about 3 meters long, 2.7 meters wide, and 2.2 meters tall). But at 2,260 pounds (1,025 kilograms), it weighs less than a compact car. In some sense, the rover parts are similar to what any living creature would need to keep it “alive” and able to explore.
The perseverance robot is not going to Mars alone; it is carrying under its belly a helicopter named Ingenuity. Of course the helicopter is autonomous too and will be the first of its kind on Mars. Perseverance is expected among other things to pick rock samples from Mars and also perform some high level exploration of the Martian surface as it features a number of cameras and high fidelity electronic gadgets in its makeup.
The samples collected by the Perseverance will be returned to earth via another mission or during a return of the rover which remains only a probability according to NASA.
United Launch Alliance is an American spaceflight company (you can see it as a competitor to the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin). ULA is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space and Boeing Defense, Space & Security division.
The perseverance rover is expected to travel for at least 200 days to get to Mars. ETA for the trip is set as Feb 18 2021.
“…let there be Light, and there was Light” — God.
