Listen Here
By Victoria Hansen
hansenv@findlay.edu
After 10 days of breaking records, NASA’s Artemis II is ready to come home. The Orion capsule holding the astronauts will splash down at approximately 8:07 p.m. EDT off the coast of San Diego on April 10, after setting records by sending humans the farthest away from Earth that they’ve ever been.
This mission is the first time that humans have been to the moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972, although the astronauts did not visit the lunar surface, instead opting for a fly-by. The goal of Artemis II is to test the life-support systems, heat shields, and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. NASA says that Artemis II “will confirm all the spacecraft’s systems operate as designed with crew aboard in the actual environment of deep space.”
“The mission will pave the way for lunar surface missions, establishing long-term lunar science and exploration capabilities, and inspire the next generation of explorers,” NASA says on its website.
The mission, which is the first crewed voyage to the far side of the moon, often seen as the “dark” side, has not been widely publicized at the University of Findlay.
“I haven’t heard much about it,” said Noah Fischbach, a second-year student in the Master of Rhetoric and Writing program. “I think it’s something that NASA’s doing in space or something?”
The Artemis II launched at a crowded time in the U.S. news cycle, with the president delivering an address about the ongoing war in Iran just hours after the mission launched. However, some UF students were in tune with the mission.
Rayna Rodenkirchen, a third-year pharmacy student, hosted a watch party when Artemis II launched.
“I think that Artemis II is mostly historical, very exciting, and very cool,” Rodenkirchen said. “I think the experiments they are doing with tissue are cool.”
Rodenkirchen is referring to the AVATAR, A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response, investigation on Artemis II. This investigation uses a mix of bone marrow cells and computer chips to study the effects of space radiation and microgravity on humans.
The next Artemis mission, Artemis III, will be another crewed mission, this time focusing on practicing the rendezvous and docking between the SLS and the commercial lander that will put astronauts on the moon. Instead of developing their own lunar lander, NASA will be using one built by either Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. Once a lander has been chosen for this mission, Artemis IV will land two people on the moon, who will spend approximately a week on the surface.
