Artemis II crew makes TIME Magazine cover
The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen will be launched on a mission to the moon and back no earlier than March. This will be the first time humans have been to the moon since 1972.
Jeffrey Kluger, editor at large at TIME, called Artemis II a landmark for humanity, and believes the crew feels the weight of the mission.
“None of these crew members were alive the last time we walked on the moon. I think having been born into a world in which the moon landings were history, and having grown up to be the crew that will return us to the vicinity of the moon, that has to carry some historical freight, and it would be hard for me to believe that that these folks don't feel that and feel a certain responsibility as well,” Kluger said.
Returning to the moon has been done before, but Artemis will be full of firsts. Glover will be the first person of color to travel to the moon, and Koch will be the first woman to make the trip. Jeremy Hansen, in a collaboration between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, will be the first Canadian sent to the moon. This will make Canada the second nation to achieve that feat.
"Fifty or 60 years ago, there were two great titanic space powers, the Soviet Union and the U.S., and these were very much mononational enterprises,” Kluger said. “Now we have opened up the enterprise of space exploration. Not only is a Canadian -- a non-American -- flying to the moon for the first time, in 2020, the U.S. government established the Artemis Accords, which is an international pact of any member nations who want to participate in the Artemis program [...] in a collective multinational effort to get to the moon.”
In his recent article, Kluger writes that “Apollo 8 saved 1968. Artemis II may work similar magic today.” In a time filled with uncertainty and political tension both national and international, being seen as one Earth from hundreds of thousands of miles away could bring unity to humanity – even for just a brief moment.
“I think there's something transcendent about the mere fact that people are going to these places and doing these remarkable things,” Kluger said. “I spoke to Michael Collins, the command module pilot for Apollo 11 in 2019 on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. He said when they went on their global tour after they got back, he said people routinely said to him, congratulations, we did it. He said he had expected people to say, congratulations, you did it. [...] I think that's very much in keeping with how people experience these things. We experience them collectively.”
A tiny telescope on a big mission
The Pandora space telescope launched earlier this year on a mission to study 20 exoplanets across the universe. It will study the atmospheres of these planets, looking at them 10 times a year, for 24 hours at a time. In its mission, it will search for signs of habitable works, like atmospheres containing water and hydrogen.
Ben Hord, deputy lead of science operations, and a member of the science team of the Pandora small sat mission, said Pandora is looking at the atmospheres for those signs of life, and even scanning for things like clouds on the exoplanets.
Hord said the way the telescope searches for some of these elements is by using the exoplanet’s host star’s light. Pandora has to disentangle what light comes from the exoplanet, and what light comes from the host star.
“I order to understand what these planetary atmospheres are made of, and how they work and where the gasses move around, is to actually harness the light of the host star,” Hord said. “So, when the exoplanet passes in front of the host star, some of the light from the host star actually filters through the atmosphere of the exoplanet before it reaches us. You can think of it kind of like filtering light through a stained-glass window. As the light goes through the window or the atmosphere, the color and fingerprint of what it's going through is actually imprinted on the light.”
Other telescopes searching for exoplanets, like the James Webb Space Telescope, don’t have the ability to stare at a planet for long periods of time. Hord said because Pandora has this ability for this 20-planet mission, the hope is to expand this power and study more exoplanets in the future.
“Having the capability to stare for a long time over the course of a year and take these two data sets, the visible and the near infrared together, on the same observatory Is really what's groundbreaking here,” Hord said. “The idea, or kind of the long-term goal from this is to create a catalog of these stars so that when other observatories find exoplanet candidates around these stars, you're able to use your stellar profile to remove that and really get a look at the atmosphere.”
Of the major telescopes, Hord explained that the main collaboration will take place between Pandora and the James Webb Space Telescope. He said one of the best ways to explain the relationship is that the James Webb Space Telescope is an oak tree, and from that tree an acorn fell, and Pandora grew.
“The James Webb Space Telescope is a sports car,” Hord said. “Extremely engineered, very sophisticated, pushes the cutting edge. But like any good sports car, it has its blind spots, so it's not able to do these long duration stairs like Pandora is. It's not able to simultaneously get the full wavelength coverage that Pandora is. Pandora, in a sense, is adding a mirror to that sports car to close that one blind spot. The near infrared detector on Pandora is actually a flight spare from the James Webb Space Telescope.”
