(Image courtesy of NASA)
Humanity’s return to the Moon after 5 decades is about more than a new spot to plant the flag. There is some real science coming as the Artemis program brings us back to the Moon.
There are several reasons NASA chose the Moon’s south pole region for landing, even though it’s harder to land there than the equatorial areas Apollo visited, like the Sea of Tranquility, the Ocean of Storms and Fra Mauro, which were relatively flatter than the more heavily cratered southern polar region. Doctor Baptiste Journaux, a planetary sciences expert at the University of Washington, says the picked those new sites because they expect to find different rocks that are more like the Moon’s crust.
Journaux says right now, we count craters to estimate the Moon’s age, so new samples and counting from that region could help them calibrate their scale and date the entire solar system. In the Apollo missions, Journaux says, “we were able to bring back samples, date them very precisely, and then actually count the craters in that area and make very nice calibration curves for the age versus the number of craters. And this is what is used now on Mars [and] on the icy moons of Europa, for example.”
One of the most important reasons for hitting the lunar south pole is water, which comes from ice Doctor Journaux says was likely deposited by comets and was preserved in areas that never see the sun. That water can be used for drinking, growing food with organic material and other nutrients added to the virtually dead lunar soil) and especially fuel. If you use, for example, cryogenic engines with hydrogen and oxygen for the return from the Moon, you could actually mine the fuel directly there,” Journaux says, “and that would help a lot to make the base independent from the Earth.”
Even the most powerful rocket ever built – the Space Launch System (SLS) – has limits for how much weight it can lift into orbit, so carrying less fuel at launch also means more weight allowance for equipment and supplies to help establish a permanent lunar base.
The four engines at the base of the SLS are RS-25 engines built by Aerojet Rocketdyne, which has a facility in Redmond. The RS-25 is the same engine found in a three-engine configuration on the backs of the Space Shuttles. The engines on the Artemis One rocket are, themselves, “alumni” of several Shuttle missions.
You can see the complete interview with UW Planetary Sciences professor, Doctor Baptiste Journaux in the video below:
This NASA video explains the potential lunar landing sites:
