Day 6 of NASA's Artemis II mission should carry the Orion spacecraft past the dark side of the moon in early April. At that moment, the four astronauts aboard Orion will be roughly 250,000 miles from Earth.
Jim Gavio, director of the Yahn Planetarium at Penn State Behrend, previewed the 10-day mission with several weeks of Artemis-related programming, including a talk by a manager in NASA's Moon to Mars Program Office. He said the themed programming will continue for the foreseeable future, including with an immersive show titled "FORWARD! To the Moon."
"The Artemis missions are very important," Gavio said. "We're not just sending up probes. We're sending people to the moon for the first time since 1972."
The four-member crew will not land on the moon. Instead, NASA and its commercial partners, SpaceX and Blue Origin, will use the Artemis mission to test docking maneuvers. Those tests will support future flights, including a planned lunar landing in 2028.
Orion will detach from the top of the new Space Launch System rocket, which is 322 feet tall. The crew will use a free-return trajectory - a "push" from the moon's gravity, basically - to come back to Earth. If it works, Gavio said, NASA's flight controllers will begin to eye another, much larger, target.
"It's a stepping stone for going to Mars," he said of the mission. "What we learn from going to our relatively close neighbor - the moon - we will use to actually get us to Mars someday."
To learn more about the Artemis II mission, and related programming at Yahn Planetarium, watch the video below:
