Recovering the spacecraft will allow NASA to collect important data for future missions.
This includes information about the vessel’s position after flight, data from monitors that measure acceleration and vibration, and a mannequin in the capsule to test how to protect people from radiation while flying through space. is applied.
Some capsule components should be good for reuse in the Artemis 2 mission, which is already in advanced stages of planning.
That mission, which is planned for 2024, would take a crew to the Moon but still without landing on it.
Artemis 3, scheduled for 2025, will be the first to land a spacecraft on the Moon’s south pole, where they are expected to find water in the form of ice. Thereafter the space agency aims to launch one mission per year.
“Today we have hardware working around the world through Artemis 5, it’s not just one flight and we’re done,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator.
As part of the Artemis mission, NASA plans to send a woman and a person of color to the Moon for the first time.
Only 12 people – all of them white people – have set foot on the Moon. That was during NASA’s historic Apollo mission, which ended in 1972.
NASA hopes to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon through a base on the surface as well as an orbital space station.
Learning how people can live on the Moon should help engineers develop technologies for a longer trip to Mars, possibly in the late 2030s.