The Artemis 2 moon mission is naturally, getting a heavy focus on the three NASA astronauts (Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch) and one Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut (Jeremy Hansen) on the crew. But it’s also worth talking about the science it will perform in support of the Artemis program more generally, as well as larger sets of work.
NASA talked about the science in a livestreamed briefing from NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) on Tuesday (Sept. 23), and SpaceQ also spoke individually with a lunar geology expert, both of which are helping to inform the information below.
For context, Artemis 2 is the second of the Artemis program – Artemis 1 was an uncrewed mission around the moon in 2022, Artemis 2 will somewhat replicate Artemis 1’s work with humans on board in 2026 or so, and then Artemis 3 is slated as the first moon-landing mission of the Artemis program later in the 2020s.
As is typical of NASA investigations, first principles come from a document called the Decadal Survey. The U.S. National Academies of Science produces these documents once a decade at the request of the agency and its partners, to determine science priorities. The most recent Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032 was produced in 2022, luckily when Artemis missions were well in the planning and just before Artemis 2’s crew was named.
An examination of questions shows some of the pressing moon priorities, to continue from work with Apollo geology as well as robotic landing, orbiting and impact missions for decades. Examples of Decadal questions directly relating to the moon are clustered under Question 3, “Origin of Earth and Inner Solar System Bodies” and include “How Did the Earth-Moon System Form?”, “How and When Did the Terrestrial Planets and Moon Differentiate?” Then there are more generic questions relating to moon and planetary science together, such as several subheadings under “Impacts and Dynamics” (Question 4) and “Solid Body Interiors and Surfaces (Question 5).
On the more technical side, NASA has a set of “Moon to Mars” architecture guidelines. This is more of the “how” of exploration and again, was issued when Artemis planning was well under way. A page on “recurring tenets”, for example, includes principles such as international collaboration, industry collaboration, responsible use, safe crew return and good use of their time, interoperability and commerce/space development. There are pages regarding lunar infrastructure, and several facets in which lunar science will advance our understanding of the solar system more generally.
SpaceQ spoke individually on Tuesday with Jacob Bleacher, NASA’s chief exploration scientist, to learn a little more about how these documents influenced Artemis 2 planning. He said that of course, given the documents are very high-level it would be difficult to “see” the science of Artemis 2 there, but these frameworks help the agency find “smaller and smaller actionable pieces that we can do” under each objective.
He paid tribute to separately funded organizations at NASA who are also important to the work of this crewed mission: the Human Research Program, and biology and physical sciences under the Science Mission Directorate (which has its own Decadal Survey from 2022 here). These are also in the background of Artemis 2 planning, although again, the objectives at the high level are not necessarily visible in the mission.
As such, Bleacher provided the focus of Artemis 2 science: “To enable us to explore in space for longer periods of time, we have to understand how life responds to that [deep space] environment – whether that’s the life that’s the human being, or the life that’s the microbial environment. That’s really what this research campaign is about. For Artemis 2 is giving us the first set of deep-space measurements that match up with the existing research we’ve been doing on the ISS.”
The moon will be roughly the size of a basketball in the view of the astronauts when they make their closest approach at about 5,000 nautical miles (for comparison, Apollo 8 was 67.4 nautical miles – almost 10 times closer.) Nevertheless the astronauts are of course highly trained in geology and will be taking camera observations and visual observations.
“We’re intrigued to see what they can actually see from there. So they’re going to be telling us what they can see. And then from that, their geology training will take over, and they can start to describe the geologic features,” Bleacher said.
“For instance, when you look at the moon, often people pick out round features, and they can pick out differences in the colour – like brighter white to kind of gray – and so the circular features are impact craters. They’ll start to be able to describe those things. Then what we’re really interested in is understanding if they see something that doesn’t quite fit what they expected to see, so they can describe that to us from their perspective.”
As for the camera equipment, there is plenty of it. How much? So much that the diagrams and list fill an entire page of this 2023 NASA presentation about Artemis 2 from the Orion Imagery Working Group. As of that time, the interior and exterior camera equipment list for the Orion spacecraft included:
- 4 Solar Array Wing (SAW) cameras
- 3 in-cabin wireless cameras
- 3 external wired cameras
- 2 human-health monitoring cameras
- 2 camera controllers
- 1 Fwd Bay high speed camera
- 4 wireless cameras for NatGeo payload (proprietary data)
- 4 Portable computing devices (tablets) with webcams
- 2 Nikon D5 DSLR camera bodies (+ lenses, batteries, etc.)
- 2 ZCube video encoders (prime + spare)
- 1 Docking Camera (DCAM)
- 1 Optical Navigation (OPNAV) camera
- 1 drag-on temp-mount camera to monitor crew ingress (KSC system)
“I think what we’re going to ask them to do is just take pictures of the moon itself, if they can, and describe to us what they see,” Bleacher said of the crew’s use of these cameras, and their eyes. “We’re really intrigued to see if they can see something that we didn’t expect to see, like: Can they see colours? Or can they see anything particularly along he limbs of the moon, where you’re kind of seeing the edge of the moon against the darkness behind it?”
Bleacher paid tribute to Apollo’s reams of observations, saying the data allows Artemis to “stand on the shoulder of giants.” Without naming specifics, he added it is easier than ever to parse the data given “there are new websites you can go to online where you can just follow the entire the entire path of a single mission, hear what the astronauts are saying, how they talk to each other, what their observations are.” (Apollo in Real Time is one example, featuring Apollos 11, 13 and 17).
“We use what they have done as a starting point to help build the training curriculum for the geology … it’s based out of that same curriculum,” Bleacher said of Apollo. (More details on that curriculum are available from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.) Once the Artemis astronauts are trained up on what looks normal, he continued, the next thing is to describe what “looks odd.”
“The first thing you need to do in science is to look, right. Stop whatever it is you’re doing and look, and then observe. So ‘observe’ means you need to be able to start to see the things that are important from a science perspective, and then describing and documenting. So … describe what it is and make sure that it’s documented, whether that’s a picture or a description that you have recorded or you’re writing notes for yourself.
“We have a few of those principles that we laid out for them,” Bleacher continued, “and then we teach them about the processes that lead to what they see – or the product. We like to say, ‘inferring process from product’. So when they look at the moon, they will see the end result, and from that, a scientist will then begin to infer the process, or set of processes, that occurred that led to what we see. That’s really the science that is in geology.”
NASA also held an hour-long science conference Sept. 23. As SpaceQ is a Canadian publication, we will focus on the NASA-developed flywheel device for Orion as an example of an experiment with direct CSA links.
As CSA has explained, the Canadian agency worked in collaboration with NASA to replicate the flywheel’s dimensions, gears and resistance levels on a “commercially available flywheel device”, and used it to trial various exercise protocols. This was done as part of the campaign to medically support Hansen as well as his backup, CSA astronaut Jenni Gibbons.
In 2024, a prototype of the flywheel was tested in microgravity during parabolic flights with the National Research Council’s Falcon 20, which took off nearby CSA headquarters at the Montreal Metropolitan Airport in Longueuil, Quebec.
CSA also worked on ground-based training protocols in collaboration with Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services (CFMWS), which “enlisted members of the Canadian Armed Forces and personnel from CFMWS and the CSA for multi-day testing campaigns on Earth,” CSA stated previously. This campaign included 30 participants, who did 10 sessions each (two testing sessions and then eight training sessions.)
At the briefing Tuesday, Debbie Korth (deputy Orion program manager at JSC, where the press conference was held), explained more about how the flywheel will be used for the astronauts. Each crew member will be assigned 30 minutes of exercise a day. (By comparison, International Space Station missions require about two hours per day, including setup time for different devices, because of the multi-month-long length of each mission.)
“If you walk inside the hatch of the crew module, it’s right there on the floor,” she said. “They can perform two types of exercise. One is rowing, and so they actually row into the empty volume of the crew module. While the other three crew members are sort of staying out of the way, the one exercising crew member exercises out into that volume. There is no seat. So it’s a rower, but it’s not like a rower you’d have at the gym. There’s no seat required. They’re just rowing on into the free volume.
“They can also use it for resistive exercise device to help keep the muscles strong as well,” she continued. “The rowing is the cardiovascular part, and they use it for resistive: they can do squats, deadlifts, other things. There’s a different attachment. You attach to the flywheel, and it’s very much the harder you pull, the more it wants to pull you back.”
The astronauts have already trained on versions of the flywheel regularly at JSC’s astronaut gym. But a question remains for the mission: “How does this work when you got other crew members trying to do other activities … while you have one person, some of which are some very tall people on this mission, and see how that works out.” (The “tall” reference is likely about Hansen, who has been listed in media as being close to 6 feet, 2 inches.)
“We’re also looking at how the dynamics of how that device interacts with the spacecraft, because they’re putting load into the spacecraft, so our reaction control system engines having to respond,” Korth added. “How does our …system read these disturbances that are going to the spacecraft? This mission is short enough that exercise isn’t absolutely required, but it’s going to be required for longer missions. So we need to know how, how does the exercise work? And then how does the spacecraft respond to this dynamic activity?”
Lunar observations and the flywheel are just a couple of examples of the science. NASA’s website lists the numerous science experiments that will be expected on Artemis 2.