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HOUSTON–Much of the planned science return from NASA’s Artemis III Moon landing mission with astronauts will be contained in a look at the Solar System’s earliest era.
Astronauts will study the geology at the Moon’s south pole within reach of the South Pole–Aitkin Basin, which at 4.5 billion years is the oldest and deepest known impact basin in the Solar System.
Currently planned for launch in mid-2027, at least two of the yet-to-be-named, four-person Artemis III crewmembers would spend about 6 1/2 days of the 30-day mission at one of nine landing site options. NASA is assessing for those sites a region between 84 degrees south longitude at the Moon and the south pole itself, which are separated by about 180 km (112 mi.).
NASA scientists involved in the mission planning participated in a May 8 presentation to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) to help initiate and inform a NASA-sponsored look ahead at future Artemis mission objectives. The presentation was entitled, “Key Non-Polar Destinations Across the Moon to Address Decadal-level Science Objectives with Human Explorers.”
The presentations were made by Noah Petro and Barbara Cohen, NASA’s Artemis III and IV mission science leads from the Goddard Space Flight Center. They appeared to make it clear that NASA’s goal of establishing a sustainable human presence at the Moon includes far-reaching science objectives from the very start.
“It is a total anchor point for the Earth/Moon system bombardment, which anchors our Solar System’s dynamical history,” Cohen told the 13-member NASEM panel, referring to the Solar System’s early impactful planet-forming process.
“Even when we look out to extrasolar planetary systems to see how material is being exchanged between their suns and their forming planets, we look back at our understanding of how our Solar System exchanged material,” Cohen said. “The South Pole–Aitkin Basin is the cornerstone for that entire history. It’s an amazing place, and we want to maximize that. It’s a really nice niche early in our capability.”
Petro’s detailed focus on the Artemis III mission science pointed to the gathering of samples that could identify the presence of volatiles–substances that transition from liquid or solid states to vapors, including water ice, at low temperatures–and how those processes could vary in sunlit and permanently shadowed regions of the Moon at the South Pole–Aitkin Basin.
Like the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon, Artemis crews will be equipped to gather samples from the lunar surface–some ejected by the long-ago impact that created the Aitkin Basin–for return to Earth for preservation and scientific analysis.
“Understanding what is happening at the Moon today is why the Moon is so important to study processes that happened 4.5 billion years ago and understanding ongoing processes,” Petro said.
Like Cohen, Petro stressed that Artemis missions will pursue objectives across a range of scientific fields, from biological and physical sciences to Earth science, heliophysics, astronomy and astrophysics.
The Artemis III science payloads that Petro outlined include the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s lunar dielectric analyzer. It was developed to measure surface properties, including volatiles and how they transition in response to the changes in temperature associated with exposure to sunlight and darkness.
The Lunar Environment Monitoring System will be deployed to monitor seismic activity for about two years after Artemis III departs the Moon.
The Artemis Lunar Laser Retroreflector is a derivative of a similar instrument delivered to the lunar surface earlier this year aboard the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost-1 lander. It will use laser beams to generate photons able to provide additional geophysical data about the Moon for perhaps up to five centuries.
The Lunar Effects on Agriculture Flora experiment will seek to understand how the Moon’s low gravity level and other environmental factors affect plant growth.
The Artemis III Orion crew capsule will be equipped to monitor astronauts’ health and physical responses as they become the first humans to leave the Earth for the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.
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