The most powerful rocket ever built will soon head for the Moon, carrying with it a trove of satellites and radiation experiments.
Zea’s experiment, which will be travelling on the test flight with a number of others, will be tucked beneath one of the astronaut seats on Orion. “We have reached a new age of spaceflight sciences research,” says Zea, an aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The flight, dubbed Artemis 1, is the first in what NASA is calling its Artemis programme. It is named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, to signify that it is the modern-day incarnation of the agency’s Apollo programme, which sent astronauts to the Moon for the first time. Artemis 2 will fly astronauts around the Moon, no earlier than 2024.
One of the ice-mapping cubesats launching on Artemis 1 will fly low over the Moon’s south pole, hunting for water in the form of hydrogen. Known as LunaH-Map, it will make the highest-resolution map yet of neutrons that indicate where the hydrogen lies . “That will tell us where the water ice is,” says Craig Hardgrove, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe and principal investigator for the mission.
Zea’s experiment will begin once the Orion capsule is in deep space. When it is out beyond the shield of Earth’s magnetic field, which protects life on Earth from lethal space radiation, pumps will activate and begin pushing a special culture fluid into bags with freeze-dried yeast. The yeast will grow until they have consumed all the fluid, which will take about three days, and then die.
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