An artist’s conception of the Orion spacecraft approaching the Moongate. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin finds himself on the surface of the moon during the first moon landing in 1969. Neil Armstrong, commander of the US Apollo 11 mission, was the first person to set foot on the moon.
In 1966, the Soviet Union made the first soft landings and took the first photographs from the lunar surface during the Luna 9 and Luna 13 missions. was more successful, obtaining in 1959 the first exit from Earth’s gravity using Luna 1, the first collision with the lunar surface using Luna 2, and the first photograph of the Moon on the opposite side using Luna 3. After the launch in 1957 of the USSR satellite Sputnik, the first spacecraft to orbit the Earth, it became clear that the next major target of the Soviet and American space programs would be the Moon (see space exploration).
The first attempts at lunar exploration were the result of the ongoing Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union sent unmanned spacecraft into orbit and landed on the moon. The first wave of lunar exploration focused on providing the information humans need to land on the moon and return safely to Earth, while initial exploration of other objects focused on simple exploration of unknown surfaces. The samples collected during these lunar explorations have yielded a wealth of knowledge about the moon’s geology and formation. NASA also landed a spacecraft on its surface in 1966, carrying the first NASA Surveyor space probes, which were equipped with cameras to scan the lunar surface and to analyze lunar rocks and Dirt soil sampler.
These exploration robots broadcast images of the moon, scanned the lunar surface, and searched for the Apollo landing sites. The latest robotic missions first mapped the Moon from orbit and obtained ultra-high resolution images of potential landing sites, confirming their safety for the next Apollo missions. Each of the Apollo missions—and the astronauts who remained in the orbital command module during subsequent landings—took hundreds of high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface.
The first landing occurred in 1969, when two Apollo 11 astronauts placed scientific instruments and returned lunar samples to Earth. At the beginning of 2019, my country’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft achieved an unmanned landing on the far side of the moon for the first time, and successfully deployed the Yutu-2 lunar rover. The landing comes after a 37-year hiatus from exploring the lunar surface, becoming the first controlled soft landing on the moon since the return of Soviet champion robot Luna 24 in August 1976.
His “Change” series of robotic lunar missions has been hugely successful, with the first landing on the opposite side of our nearest space neighbor in 2019 (Change 4), and he plans to return the first samples from the south lunar pole with Change 6 (due to launch in 2023). ). By the end of the last decade, NASA plans to deploy its manned exploration vehicle Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle to the second point of the Lagrange Moon, which, while not providing access to the lunar surface on its own, can still facilitate exploration of the surface on the opposite side by acting as a communication relay and as a node for remote control of ground-based instruments [43].
The orbiting outpost will support longer lunar expeditions and possibly multiple flights to the lunar surface as part of a single mission for the Artemis program. Like the Apollo program more than 50 years ago, Artemis will begin with a mission around the moon and then land on the lunar surface. In addition to manned and unmanned missions, the Artemis program also includes the construction of the Lunar Gateway space station in lunar orbit. Manned and unmanned missions are becoming more complex, which will lay the groundwork for sustainable human and robotic exploration of Earth’s only natural satellite, the Moon.
The global space community is gearing up for the Artemis program, a multipurpose campaign that will push man to explore deep into space, to the Moon and to Mars, Moon, Mars. The Artemis program is a new generation of lunar exploration missions designed to send people into space more than ever. Through manned and unmanned missions, NASA will land the first woman and the first black person on the surface of the Moon. If the agency’s Artemis program goes well, in the near future, NASA and its partners may also develop a lunar-orbiting space station that can serve as a gateway to destinations on its surface and beyond.
The Hercules mission could begin in 2028, allowing us to gain knowledge of human-computer interaction as we land a spacecraft on our moon, use a portal-controlled rover to collect samples and send them back to Earth. Access to the archive requires a renewed commitment to lunar exploration, deploying next-generation scientific instruments on the lunar surface and returning more samples from the lunar surface. Satisfactory solutions to most of these problems will not be achieved by further orbital remote sensing missions, but will require returning additional samples and deploying a new generation of scientific instruments on the lunar surface [1,5,14,45,48].
Results from the mission are available on NASA’s Planetary Data System and several public lunar archive sites, such as Moon Trek and LROC QuickMap. The first rover to land on the moon was the Soviet spacecraft Lunokhod-1 on November 17, 1970, as part of the Lunokhod program. In 2018, NASA unveiled plans to return to the moon with commercial and international partners as part of the agency’s global research activities in support of Space Policy Directive 1, leading to the creation of the Artemis program and the Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS).