How NASA astronauts will train to walk on the moon in 2026 | technology

The mission is scheduled to launch in September 2026 Artemis IIINASA plans to send people to the moon’s surface, and if successful, this will be the first time since 1972 that a human has set foot on the moon’s surface. Therefore, the US space agency is training its astronauts to learn to walk on the rocky surface of the satellite, according to a report in the magazine. nature.

“There’s a lot we need to relearn or discover,” said Julianne Gross, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, who will oversee lunar surface samples collected by the Artemis 3 mission when it returns to Earth.

Astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Douglas, who will participate in the mission, are training on a rocky plain in the high desert of northern Arizona. “We incorporated very early on the scientific rigor that these missions would need,” Robbins said.

The simulated moonwalk was a massive undertaking, connecting astronauts in the field in Arizona with mission controllers and a science team in Houston — working together in real time to design what the astronauts should do on the simulated lunar surface. Leading scientists, famous astronauts and NASA heads were present to witness the historic test. “More than six years after the agency officially launched the Artemis program to return humans to the moon, the Artemis moon landing appears to be real,” The Guardian reported. nature.

Artemis III

As with the Apollo 11 landing in 1969, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to set foot on the moon, the Artemis 3 landing is primarily intended to get astronauts there and back safely.

NASA has enhanced its astronaut training to incorporate more field geology, so crew members can learn how to explore the lunar landscape and determine which rocks to collect, as well as how to infer the geological history of an area.

For example, on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, two former test pilots discovered a glowing fragment of what turned out to be the primordial lunar crust and brought it home. This sample, dubbed Genesis Rock, helped geologists understand how the Moon solidified from an ocean of molten magma more than four billion years ago.

In the 2000s and 2010s, NASA trained astronauts to observe Earth from the International Space Station. Now, through visits to places like asteroid craters and volcanic terrain, astronauts experience what it would be like on the moon. “That’s OK,” says Cynthia Evans, a geologist at JSC who leads geological training for astronauts.

Artemis III will visit a part of the Moon that astronauts have never explored before: the lunar south pole. Given the region’s high latitude, the lighting will be strong and at a steep angle to the surface as the sun rotates around the horizon. The contrast between brightly lit areas and deep shadows will make it difficult for astronauts to operate in the environment.

How was the test

The starting point for recent extravehicular activities (EVAs) exercise was the San Francisco Volcanic Field, north of Flagstaff, Arizona, where NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS) trained Apollo astronauts in the 1960s, known as the JETT5 test for “Joint The EVA and human surface mobility testing team conducted the test on private land near a cinder cone known as SP Crater (SP stands for “shit bowl,” because the crater and associated lava flow look as if someone had knocked over the chamber pot and its contents spilled over. natural views.)

Last year, USGS geologists mapped the test area and delivered those maps to JSC researchers gathered in a room during the training exercise. The researchers created four lunar walk simulations, each starting from the landing site to explore lava flows, canyons and other geology in the area. “This is very relevant to exactly what we will be doing for Artemis,” says Lauren Edgar, a geologist at the USGS in Flagstaff and co-leader of the JETT5 science team.

During the third of four lunar walk-throughs this month, Rubins and Douglas donned spacesuits that mimic what the Artemis team might wear on the Moon, and “descended” from their lander by walking across a set of orange poles held together with duct tape. Suddenly they were on the moon, albeit full of anthill and cow dung.

Rubins and Douglas took photos and began collecting rocks and radioing their observations back to mission control. They were so efficient at working with their carefully designed checklists that they were quickly ahead by ten minutes.

Every decision during real-time testing must be justified and carefully documented. “We can’t just say we want that rock,” said Jose Hurtado, a geologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who participated in the simulation. “We have to explain why we want that particular rock and why it relates to our priorities.”

Not everything went smoothly during the night outside the vehicle. The flight operations team deliberately included some challenges, including interrupting video communications with the astronauts whenever they traveled farther from the probe. An artificial 20-minute delay in downloading images meant that the science team often couldn’t see real-time images of the rocks the astronauts were collecting.

During the final phase of JETT5, the astronauts performed the longest moonwalk simulation to date, lasting nearly four hours. They collected about 38 kilograms of rocks and soil and accomplished their main goals.

NASA isn’t planning another large exercise like JETT5 anytime soon, but there will be smaller efforts to test specific instruments to explore the moon. If NASA wants to realize its Artemis dreams, there is a lot of work to be done.

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