The most intense activities of the mission are concentrated between today and tomorrow: over thirty targets selected by NASA will be observed on board the Orion Integrity. No worries about the communications blackout, which in the future will be canceled by a network of satellites
From six in the morning Italian time today, April 6, the Orion capsule officially entered the area of influence of lunar gravity, i.e. where this is stronger than the force of Earth’s gravity. This situation will attract it towards the satellite, while it is the speed with which the spacecraft proceeds that allows it not to fall on the Moon and to carry out a flyby during which astronauts will be able to observe less well-known parts of it in detail. They are the first humans to do so since December 1972, but the first equipped with technologies that did not exist at the time. At the time of writing, Orion’s position corresponds to 62,764 kilometers from the Moon and 373,368 kilometers from Earth. Following this trajectory it will get much closer to the lunar surface and on Monday evening it will pass approximately 6,400 kilometers from the Selenic surface. Precisely this relatively short distance places the capsule in such a shadowed position that it cannot communicate with the control centers for just under an hour. The radio and infrared waves used for connections travel in a direct (i.e. optical) line, therefore in the absence of an artificial satellite placed in lunar orbit from which both the capsule and the Earth can be observed simultaneously, on which to bounce the signals, communication is impossible. In this situation it will not be possible to use the Deep Space Network system to connect with the spaceship, but it must be remembered that similar interruptions also occurred during the Artemis I missions and in almost all those of the Apollo program. It will be like this for a few more years, until the satellites for trans-lunar communications foreseen by more than one space program underway today are launched. The first is from the European Space Agency (ESA) and is called Moonlight: it aims to deploy a constellation of five satellites for navigation and communications starting with this year’s Lunar Pathfinder, then offering complete services by 2030. The second is NASA’s Lunar Communications Relay and Navigation Systems (LCRNS), which relies on the collaboration of commercial companies to create an infrastructure similar to that conceived by the European agency. Both initiatives are aimed at installing lunar repeaters to provide navigation (similar to GPS) and high data rate, low latency links, including laser communication. The objectives are clear: continuous connectivity even around the Moon; coverage of areas not visible from Earth, such as the lunar south pole, support for the nascent lunar economy by allowing commercial lunar activities. Therefore, for the four astronauts of the Artemis 2 mission, the day of April 6 will be that of observing approximately 35 objectives defined by NASA: among these there is the Eastern basin, a crater of almost 965 kilometers in diameter which extends across the visible side and the hidden side of the Moon, which will be completely illuminated and visible while the Orion will come closer. This 3.8 billion-year-old crater was formed when a large object struck the lunar surface and preserves clear traces of that collision, including the spectacular topography of its rings. The crew will study its features from different angles using special software developed by the Crew Lunar Observations Team, a subgroup of the Artemis 2 lunar science team. Another lunar location under observation will be the Hertzsprung Basin, a nearly 640 km crater on the far side of the Moon. Its characteristics have been changed over time by subsequent impacts, so the crew will compare the topography of the two craters to better understand how the formations evolve over geologic time scales. Kelsey Young, science manager of the Artemis 2 mission, said NASA has ten science objectives and 35 “targets” for the crew to reach. They will work in shifts during the seven-hour flyby to record as many detailed observations as possible. Thus, when it is late afternoon in Italy the lunar observations will be in full swing and the transmissions of images and data will have to be simultaneous since, subsequently, the Mission Control Center will temporarily lose communications with the crew. Subsequently, in the late Italian evening, there will be the “sunset of the Earth”: our planet will slide behind the Moon from the perspective of Orion while it will reach the point of closest approach to the Moon at 6,530 km from the surface. Shortly afterwards, the record for the maximum distance from the Earth during the mission will be set and finally the crew will witness the famous Earthrise, which will mark the moment in which the globe will return visible on the opposite edge of the Moon. At 7.25pm New York time (00.25am in Italy), NASA’s Mission Control Center should re-establish communications with the astronauts. There will therefore be 36 hours of intense scientific activity that will end on Tuesday 7 April, when in the Italian afternoon Orion will exit the lunar sphere of influence 66,000 km from the natural satellite. to get onto the return path.
