Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, August 23 (Xinhua)-- NASA on Monday (August 22) approved its Artemis 1 (Artemis 1) mission to conduct an unattended test flight around the moon next week. The liftoff is scheduled for Monday, August 29, with a two-hour window opening at 08:33 EDT (20:33 Beijing time).

The historic mission is the first of NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon. The rocket will lift off from the 36B apron at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be the first flight of the Space launch system (SLS) Megarocket, the most powerful rocket in NASA's history and a critical test of its Orion spacecraft.

Artemis 1 will launch a 98-meter SLS rocket and its Orion capsule for a 42-day mission around the moon and back to Earth. NASA said the test flight was its first mission to return to the moon with a manned spacecraft in nearly 50 years, and it was the first new spacecraft of its own since it retired its space shuttle fleet a decade ago.

According to NASA's plan, Artemis 1 will lift off from launch pad 39B, the launch pad used by the Apollo 10 mission around the moon in 1969, and will take about a week to reach lunar orbit, where it will stay for about a month and then return to Earth on October 10.

"this is the first flight of a new rocket and a new spacecraft," Mike Salafin, mission manager of NASA Artemis 1, told reporters. "We are doing a very difficult thing, and there are inherent risks in it."

This picture shows the different phases of NASA's Artemis 1 mission to the moon.

NASA will carry out manned flights in the Artemis 2 mission and is expected to fly in 2024. Artemis 3, the first manned Artemis mission to the moon, aims to use the SpaceX spacecraft lander to send astronauts to one of the 13 candidate sites at the moon's south pole in 2025. However, both tasks of course depend on the test results of Artemis 1.

NASA currently has three opportunities to launch Artemis 1 in the current flight window, which opens on August 29. The backup dates are September 2 and September 5, and NASA is expected to outline its launch strategy after Saturday's launch preparation review meeting.

CTOnews.com learned that Artemis 1 (Artemis 1) mission was proposed in 2012, "Artemis" plan to achieve "lunar Antarctic landing" and "establish a sustainable lunar base" and other further lunar exploration. Artemis 1 is crucial to NASA and its manned lunar exploration program, which will be the first flight of the SLS rocket and the second mission of Orion. The launch of Artemis 1, originally scheduled for 2017, was postponed to the end of 2019 due to improvements in the design of the manned spacecraft, and has been delayed until now due to other reasons such as the epidemic.

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