The human being, in the summer of 1969, stepped on the Moon for the first time in its history, an event that has already passed more than 50 years, and that could be revived again in the coming years according to the missions that are preparing the POT.
Surely you have ever wondered why the human being has not stepped on the Moon despite the fact that aerospace technology has advanced considerably in recent decades.
And it is not easy to land on the Moon, not only are we talking about the fact that it is a satellite with practically no atmosphere, but it also does not have GPS to guide the landing well and the lunar south pole is a strange, gloomy and unknown place, and NASA wants to go exactly there.
NASA is aiming to return astronauts to the Moon, possibly by 2025, and right now they are experimenting with the uncrewed Artemis Orion spacecraft currently orbiting the satellite.
But getting people to the Moon is still a very ambitious feat: “the fact that we went there 50 years ago does not make it a trivial endeavor”, points to Mashable Csaba Palotaichair of the space sciences program in the Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology.
They will face all these hardships
As we said, one of the main difficulties that NASA will face, the moon has no atmosphere. Other spacecraft when landing on Earth use the atmosphere to slow down, something that cannot be done on the Moon.
The Moon, having an extremely thin atmosphere, the deceleration of spacecraft depends on the launch of propellants.
“There is no atmosphere, so we cannot float. There’s nothing stopping you except your engine”, adds Csaba Palotai.
This offers the astronauts smaller margins for error, and while NASA provides enough fuel to deal with unexpected things, they can’t afford big setbacks.
Another problem is that we do not have GPS on the moon. We are used to aircraft on Earth relying on GPS, a satellite navigation system that provides precise landing coordinates as planes and other craft move through the sky. But of course, these satellite networks do not exist on the Moon.
Now NASA must rely on the lunar lander’s computers to calculate how the spacecraft should engage the thrusters to stay on course for the specific landing site.
Astronauts rely on modern technology such as “terrain relative navigation,” which uses a camera to map the ground during descent. This will ensure that astronauts go to the right place and help the lander avoid craters or rocks.
The other difficulty is that NASA wants to land inside a crater at the lunar south poleand it is that they want to study if ice and other valuable resources are found in this area, but to do so they must enter a dark and very cold region.
So landing in this unknown, cold area, without GPS and without the help of an atmosphere, is not easy for the human being to return to the Moon but, luckily, all the ingredients are already prepared so that we can live this experience in these missionssurely live thanks to the Internet.