(Web Desk) - NASA's Artemis II mission will soon send astronauts on a trip around the moon, if the current plans hold. But why is the U.S. so eager to revisit the moon for the first time in more than 50 years?
NASA has promised that returning to the moon will lead to new scientific discoveries, bring economic benefits, and inspire a new generation of explorers. It's also no secret that China threatens to overtake the U.S. as the leader in space exploration, and the U.S. doesn't want to fall behind.
From a scientific perspective, humanity still has much to learn about the moon. Earth's natural satellite has a long history preserved in its rocks, and it could help researchers better understand our own planet, the solar system and the universe at large.
The moon and Earth are like twins that have been dancing around each other since the beginning of the solar system around 4.5 billion years ago, said Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. This means they have a shared history of impacts from asteroids, comets and other objects,
"It just has this 4-and-a-half-billion-year record of what has happened on its surface," Russell told Live Science. "We can see how affected it has been by impacts, which have also happened to the Earth, but we don't see evidence for that on the Earth so easily."
Biological processes and weather-fueled erosion obscure Earth's impact history. The moon, on the other hand, has a thin atmosphere, no weather and no life, so its impact craters can be preserved almost indefinitely. These conditions also provide other research opportunities.
"It's kind of a great laboratory about what happens to geology if there isn't any water or air," Russell said. "We can understand these very fundamental [geological] processes much more easily in many cases by looking at them on the moon."
Artemis II is the second of five initial missions in the Artemis program, which aims to establish a long-term U.S. presence on the moon for the first time. The inaugural Artemis mission, Artemis I, was an uncrewed 26-day flight around the moon in 2022. Artemis II is the first crewed spaceflight in the program and is scheduled to send four astronauts on a 10-day flight around the moon and back to Earth as soon as April 1.
Each Artemis mission is meant to build on its predecessor. Artemis I laid the groundwork for Artemis II, and Artemis II is about testing systems ahead of Artemis III, Artemis IV and Artemis V.
The latter two missions aim to put astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028, with Artemis V laying the foundation for what NASA claims will be a permanent lunar base.NASA famously took 12 astronauts to the lunar surface as part of the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972.
Russell noted that lunar samples collected during the Apollo missions have kept scientists busy for more than 50 years, but the Apollo astronauts explored only some of the lunar surface on the near side of the moon, and only its equatorial region.