Sunday 11 December 2022

Nothing But Space, Man

If you happen to find yourself in the Pacific Ocean about 5.40pm this afternoon, that thing you see coming at you at 25,000 mph would be the Artemis 1's Orion Capsule which is due to splash down at the end of its 4 week jaunt around the Moon.
If all goes according to plan, the heat shield will shrug off the 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit heat on its re-entry and bob around in the Ocean until a US Navy ship comes to pick it up and hand it over to scientists to decide whether the equipment stood up well enough to send people up in it next time, currently penciled in for May 2024.
While Artemis 1 was a test, Artemis 2 plans to send astronauts around the moon in 2024 and if that all goes well its full steam ahead for Artemis 3 in 2025 and actually landing humans on the Lunar surface, the first steps towards building a lunar research base and springboard for other missions including Mars.
All very exciting for us Space geeks and something which us humans should have done a long time ago, that we haven't been back leaving footprints in the Moon dust since 1972 is a terrible indictment on us humans, but the thing i am most excited about is the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM.
This involves somehow either grabbing or deflecting an asteroid (the details are fuzzy) and placing it in orbit around the Moon. Phase one was the recent Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) where scientists rammed a satellite into the Dimorphos Asteroid to see if they could alter its orbit, which it did, so now they are deciding on which of the four candidate Asteroids it is currently eyeing up has the most favourable velocity, orbit, size and spin to safely deflect our way because if you are going to fling a massive space boulder our way you need to be sure it doesn't go wrong and you find yourself saying sorry into the smoking hole where Switzerland used to be.  
The date for becoming the owners of a new pet Asteroid is also 2025 so as long as we haven't blown our stupid selves up with a nuclear war by then, 2025 could be a very exciting time for Space fans.

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