NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to announce on April 3 the four astronauts who will venture into orbit around the Moon in the space mission “Artemis II”scheduled for the end of 2024.
The astronauts – three Americans and one Canadian – will travel aboard the Orion spacecraft of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA by its acronym in English, in the first manned test flight of the “Artemis Program”, in the agency’s plan to establish both a long-term scientific and human presence on the surface lunar .
According to the US space agency, in a statement prior to the first launch attempts of the first test mission, the official crew will be composed of a woman and a black man. For now nothing has been known about the presence of Latinos in the troupe.
The director of the agency Clarence William “Bill” Nelson he stated that they will be “three Americans and one Canadian”. So far, a launch date is scheduled for November 2024, according to the attorney and administrator of the US agency, based in Washington.
The mission, which will last about 10 days, will test life support systems of the Orion spacecraft to demonstrate both the skills and techniques needed to live and work in deep space in a way that only humans can, reports NASA. Artemis II is based on the successful Artemis I test flight (see video), which had already launched an Orion spacecraft, but on that occasion with no crew in orbit.
It was mounted on the SLS rocket, on a journey approximately 2.25 million kilometers beyond the Moon to test systems before astronauts flew aboard those systems on a mission to the Moon.
The four astronauts will take off on NASA’s SLS rocket, aboard the Orion capsule, located in the nose of the rocket. The mission will fly around the moon as part of the last test to then try to land on the moon with the Artemis III project, still without a precise date. This would be the second time humans have traveled to the natural satellite since 1969.
In December last year, the Artemis I mission successfully landed on Earth after three failed takeoff attempts multiple fuel leaksfrom Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Source: Clarin
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