Slowly but surely Artemis, NASA's lunar program, is progressing. A new small step was taken on Monday, October 28, with the publication of a refined list of potential landing sites for Artemis-3, the mission which should mark the return of humans to our satellite in 2026. Nine in number, these sites are all located near the South Pole of the Moon.
This area presents “a completely different environment from the one we landed in during the Apollo missionsexplained Sarah Noble, head of lunar science at Artemis, in a press release. It provides access to some of the oldest terrain on the Moon, as well as cold, shaded regions that may contain water and other compounds.” All the land surrounding the lunar South Pole has indeed become of strategic importance due to the water trapped there and will be crucial for future permanently inhabited bases.
To select these nine sites, NASA first relied on the very precise mapping of the Moon established by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe, launched in 2009 and still operational. The American space agency says it has taken into account various factors, such as the scientific potential of the sites – that is to say their geological interest –, the lighting conditions and the communication capabilities with the Earth, because it is necessary that future explorers will not be plunged into icy shadows or radio silence. But it was above all areas with open terrain for safe landing that were sought.
Different samples
It is moreover this same criterion which governed the choice of the sites of the Apollo missions which landed on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. These were concentrated on the lunar “seas”, in reality vast areas of volcanic effusions, darker than the other terrains but above all very flat.
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At the time of the Apollo epic, NASA did not have ultra-precise mapping of our satellite or the means to land there precisely, and so it played it safe. Even if we remember that, for Apollo-11, in 1969, Neil Armstrong had to, at the last moment, take control of the lunar module in order to prevent it from landing in a field of rocks. The other side of the coin is that it is estimated that the Apollo missions had access to less than 5% of the lunar geological diversity.
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