If things go as plannedo, new footprints are set to be planted over the lunar surface by late 2025. Now, NASA reckons the possibility of astronauts finding life on the lunar surface.
Life on the Moon
According to Space.com, new studies suggest that future lunar south pole visitors should find evidence of life in its shadowed and extremely cold craters. Such organisms may have travelled from Earth.
Prabal Saxena, a planetary researcher from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, explains that microbial life has the potential to survive in the extreme conditions close to the south pole of the Moon. Per Futurism, Saxena adds that one of the most striking findings of the team is that, considering the ranges of where particular microbes may survive, there could be habitable niches for life in protected sites over some bodies that are airless.
Saxena adds that the Moon's south pole could hold features that facilitate the survival and potential growth of certain microbes. He adds that researchers are currently looking deeper into specific organisms that have the highest suitability for survival in such areas and into specific lunar polar areas that could be the most amenable in terms of life-supporting features.
Saxena and study members reported how the Moon's south pole could possibly hold potentially habitable surface niches. They reported this during a science workshop regarding possible landing sites for the Artemis III.
ALSO READ: Artemis III Mission To Be First To Target Moon's South Pole
Artemis Missions
NASA's Artemis III Mission is initially set to deploy in late 2025, though NASA has been expressing worries that SpaceX's Starship will not be ready to transport the astronauts by this time due to the number of launches it has to undergo.
Nevertheless, the Artemis III Mission will send humans back to the Moon for the first time in fifty years. It comes after the preceding Artemis I and II missions.
In general, the Artemis program aims to have an established, sustainable, and permanent human presence over and around the Moon. The target is to get this done by the end of the 2020s. NASA thinks that the knowledge and skills that are attained by pulling off such a feat will help them deploy astronauts to Mars in the early 2040s or late 2030s.
The first one, Artemis I, was able to deploy the uncrewed Orion spacecraft into lunar orbit. The Artemis II, on the other hand, is set to deploy a team of astronauts around the Moon by late 2024 using the Orion and the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket of NASA.
Both Orion and SLS will participate in the third leg of the program as well. The pair will transport four astronauts, two of whom will board the Starship to the Moon and back.
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