The Next Steps in Lunar Exploration

NASA is preparing to send the first astronauts to the Moon’s South Pole. Learn about some of the current developments, testing, and training of lunar spacesuits, tools, and lunar rovers occurring at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and its supporting training facilities. Listen as Apollo and Artemis astronauts, as well as subject matter experts, discuss the challenges of exploring the Moon in preparation for Mars. Experts emphasize the extreme lunar conditions that astronauts will experience such as dramatic and diminished lighting conditions, lunar dust challenges, and extreme temperatures. *

What is said in the film

The moon is interesting in the sense that it has remained almost unchanged for the last three and a half billion years. We are going back to the moon. We are going to the South Pole. And of course it's there because of the potential of water. We are going back to learn to live in a deep space environment for long periods of time.

We need to celebrate this moment in human history because Artemis II is more than a mission to the moon and back. It's more than a mission that has to happen before we send people to the surface of the moon. It is the next step on the journey that gets humanity to Mars. Looking back now, you know, it was a great adventure. And something we worked hard at doing.

And so it was a rewarding experience. And I guess that's what looking at the moon gives me a sense of accomplishment. The excitement of the exploration will motivate anybody to. I want to do this, and I think all of us in Apollo had that desire. You know, there's a lot of things left to discover.

There's a lot of hard challenges. Apollo was really ahead of its time, and now we're really just back to the point where the technology, the systems are affordable and we can do this on a more sustained cadence. Our first set of missions is just how do we even get back to the moon, that human lunar return. It's taking people back to the moon, to the South Pole of the moon, even specifically, and then start building exploration, foundational exploration capabilities, sustaining that with technological advancements so that we can go for longer and longer missions. And all of that is ultimately to build on humans to Mars.

So if we work through all of the pieces correctly, we're actually developing incremental capabilities over time. And here we go three, two, one, boosters and ignition. and lift off of Artemis I. We rise together back to the moon, and beyond. So when we talk about why we want to do something different, reasons resonate with different people.

But really as an agency, we're concerned with quite a few of them. The first one, science, we're going to the South Pole because we want to explore those areas and look for different geology features, rocks, ice, if we could find it. I mean, if we could get down into a crater that's been dark for a billion years, there might actually be ice there. And that would be super exciting if we could find that we really can think about it in sort of six questions: the who, what, when, where, why and how sort of questions we are familiar with. We've talked about the why, you know, the how, how do we get there?

That's, you know, in this case, we're using the space launch system rocket, the human landing system. Orion. That's our how. And then we keep going, Who, who do we send? Splash down Now we have a lot of work to do before we get there.

And we understand that human spaceflight is like a relay race, and that baton has been passed generation to generation and from crew member to crew member and now the Artemis missions. And we understand our role in that. But our who also includes our international partners, that includes industry and academia. It's the who is a lot of folks contributing to what is the architecture. Some of the other questions like what we'll do, right.

We want to take science samples, we want to deploy technologies. So there's a lot of what when we get out there is, you know, what are we going to do once we've gotten the crew there? And that's to meet those needs and those objectives that we have as an agency. When we go, we want it to be a sustained cadence. So the when is about making sure that we can keep doing this year after year and build up to that every year being able to have a mission.

The spacesuit is you know the highlight the pinnacle of actually going to space. It is its own spacecraft. It keeps you alive. It allows you to do work. It allows that person to be hands and eyes and feet on the scene doing the activity, the human in the suit doing the activity can make that decision.

Do I go right? Do I go left? Do I pick this up? Is it worth it? Do I spend time here or do I go over here, you know, to really enhance the science that's that we're going to do when we get back to the moon.

But the thing that is the most impressive to me with these suits they’re, you know, obviously trying to have lighter weight, better human machine interface with some ergonomic improvements. The visor technology is different. It's not a bubble. It's kind of a partial bubble that just sits over your face. Great visibility.

We're looking at technology to have heads up displays like putting on a pair of glasses that gives you a readout of certain systems and the hip mobility, the ability to just kneel down, or even if you were to fall down, you could actually rotate your hips and your feet underneath you to just crouch down and stand up. And that is a really impressive part of this new suit technology, making it comfortable, making it work easy, as well as protect us for, you know, the extreme temperatures, the radiation, the lighting, you know, meteorites on a spacewalk suit is really key. In addition to ARGOS the reduced gravity test facility, there's a lot of other analog facilities like the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. And we've done testing in the Arizona deserts and other desert locations in the U. S.

and even recently in Iceland. These different types of analogs in the NBL and ARGOS here that allows us to put the whole picture together and really be ready for what's going to, what we're going to face. If anything, it's probably to our north and northeast. Yeah, I'm going to explore around a little here. I'm looking for the bright material.

What we see is vegetation going into this channel and then at the mouth of the channel is another big dark patch. There are lights above the helmet. So those lights are stationary, They're shining out in front of us. We really don't want you tripping over things. We're also wanting you to see all these geologic features and rocks and everything that you are there to to observe and find.

So we want to make sure that everything around you is illuminated properly. We work very closely with the geologists and the scientists. I mean, that's why we're there, right? I mean, we're there to go get that. That's super interesting data, but that super interesting data are in those areas that are the most challenging.

Whenever I'm in those technology development runs, I always comment to them, call Jack Schmitt, call Charlie Duke, call the folks that are around that have done this because there are things that we won't even think of that that, you know, no one taught them how to walk on the moon. I found in our suit, gripping a hammer, for instance, was it was hard to keep a good grip. You'd start pounding the core tube in and it a hammer would either twist or you drop it. So when we were looking at what do we need for Artemis, we first looked at the last Apollo mission and figured out what worked well, what types of samples did they take and what maybe could be improved on with the with the ability to kneel down. You know, in these new suits, you could actually use the same tool while you're standing and maybe trenching.

And then when you want to get closer to figure out what parts of the regolith you want to bring, or if you see a sample down there, you could kneel down and take the handle out and then use it by hand. Dust, so the top layer of soil, it's very fine. It's like powdered sugar, but it's also very sharp because there's no erosion. So not only does the dust get mechanically trapped in the outside of the suit, it gets bound electrostatically. So as we walk around in that dust on the lunar surface, we're building up a charge and that'll cause the light dust to stick to the outside of the suit Well, we didn't think anything about it, but I mean, we started driving it.

Lunar dust just pouring down on top of us. Dust is everywhere. And one of the things we learned from the Apollo anecdotes is that the lunar rovers would kick up dust when they're driving around. The batteries on the front of the lunar Rovers had had to reject heat, so they had a radiator plates on the top of them that were actually covered with dust covers. Every time they would stop, they'd open them up and let the heat radiate into space through these radiators and they would brush them off and they look at it and it's clean and they go put the brush away and go about their business.

A couple of times the battery started overheating, but the dust acts as an insulator to a certain extent and they couldn't see it. The below 50 microns in size dust that you can't see with the naked eye. So they were just moving dust around these these glass plates and not even noticing it. We are actually doing technology development projects that are looking at sensors for telling us when we've got a lot of dust accumulating on surfaces like radiators, solar panels. If you're going to operate in the South Pole, you need to figure out how much dark do you have to survive.

And so we figured out that there are areas in the moon where we can minimize that period of darkness. And so the idea would be to stay in the sun as long as you can charge up your batteries and then go to those locations that stayed light most of the time. And whenever a shadow does come, you do like a bear. You go and hibernate. And then when the sun comes back out, you wake back up and and you continue exploring.

Because some of the things that we want to be able to do is we want to be able to travel between these column hibernation points. We want to be able to travel between these points because there may be additional science we want to explore. And traveling between those points is going to take a lot of planning and vehicle design, but it also makes it really challenging. I drove this rover in the simulator. We would turn the lights on full, bright and just turn to different angles and depending on where the sun was, because at the South Pole, the sun doesn't, you know, rise and set like traditional, like we're used to here on Earth.

It just goes around the horizon at a very low angle, which creates long shadows, you know, depending on where the sun is in your field of view or not, or off to the side or behind you, it can make a really challenging environment. It's an extremely different series of challenges, right? When we go to low-Earth orbit, which is where the majority of human spaceflight experience exists, it's hours away. We can launch a mission. It can be at the space station the same day it launches.

If there's an emergency, the crew can be home in hours. When we go to the moon, we're days, two weeks away. It starts at it, right? So if there's an emergency while the crew's on the surface of the moon, they have to go back to orbit. They have to get in the spaceship.

They have to spend a week or more coming back from the moon. So you just start thinking about these challenges and the difference between months and years of help and weeks of help is huge. So we need systems that are highly reliable. Everything the crew needs, either all where it needs to be there or they have to take it with them. So that's a much, much bigger challenge than just going to the moon.

Something we always talk about here at NASA is how what we're doing is not only relevant for space exploration, but also to benefit life back here on Earth. You're going to get HD video and stills, and it's going to be you're going to see the moon like you've never seen it before. You know, you think back to some of those early Apollo shots and they were absolutely breathtaking. But I think that image that a lot of us have, I wasn't around to remember it, but when you see those grainy kind of pixelated black and white images on the TV and this is just going to be a game changer, I think people will will really feel like they're part of the mission. They'll be able to to have that sense of more what it's like there.

I can still remember the emotions that I had on the moon, you know, I mean, we were 6 hours late landing and it was and we touched down and shut down and man, here we are. We're on the moon. We're on the moon. You know, you just just excited and It was a I never got over that excitement and emotion. And, you know, we had studied the landing area so much that we felt right at home, Hey, there's Stone Mountain.

And here's you know, you see all the craters that you want to visit and know that we're home, you know, and and even looking back now, I get that same feeling of, well, that's that was my home you know, that's the thing about the Artemis missions. They're not our missions, our NASA or even, you know, all of the astronauts that will be there. This is really humankind's mission. And NASA is doing this for everybody, for everybody in our country and really for the whole world.

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