## 阿尔忒弥斯2号发射进行历史性的登月测试飞行 美国宇航局成功发射了阿尔忒弥斯2号，这是一次为期10天的载人登月任务，标志着超过50年来人类首次进入地月空间。此次任务包括首位女性和有色人种进入该太空区域，但不会在月球着陆，而是对猎户座飞船进行严格测试——旨在将宇航员带离地球比以往任何载人任务都更远。 署长贾雷德·艾萨克曼强调，这是一次至关重要的“测试任务”，为未来的月球探索和“科学与发现的黄金时代”铺平道路。四名宇航员——里德·维斯曼、维克多·格洛弗、克里斯蒂娜·科赫和杰里米·汉森——目前正在评估飞船在17,500英里/小时上升后的性能。 由于电池系统出现技术问题，发射曾面临轻微延误，但最终已得到解决。阿尔忒弥斯2号的成功是美国宇航局长期目标的重要一步，包括在月球上建立可持续的存在，并最终抵达火星。
Nasa launched Artemis II on a historic crewed mission to the moon.
The 10-day test flight, which will not land on the moon, is a mission packed with milestones. The mission includes the first woman and first person of color to fly into cislunar space, the area between Earth’s orbit and the moon.
Artemis II’s Orion space capsule could fly them farther from Earth than any human being before them.
Key events
Jared Isaacman, the Nasa administrator, spoke about the Artemis II launch on Nasa TV.
“It’s the opening act, the test mission,” for the Orion spacecraft, he said.
“No humans have ever flown on this. We’re putting it through its paces to make sure it’s OK. It’s going to set up subsequent missions [and] a golden age of science and discovery.”
Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut and Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency, who was confirmed earlier this year, was asked what his favorite moment of the mission would be.
“After ignition, the moment I’m most excited for is splashdown,” he said.
“The takeaway is gaining extra comfort in the Orion spacecraft. It’s new territory for us. SLS plus Orion is everything. On this one we want to make sure we do this in as safe a way as we can.”
Inside the Orion capsule, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen have raised their visors and are immediately commencing tasks to assess how the spacecraft handled the 17,500mph ascent to orbit.
Deployment of the solar array wings, which will provide Orion with continuous electrical power throughout its lunar journey, is about to begin.
Artemis II is now in Earth’s orbit. The two solid rocket boosters of the Space Launch System have separated and are floating back down to the Atlantic for recovery.
The spacecraft will orbit Earth until flight day two (Thursday) when the translunar injection burn will take place and sent it on the rest of its 240,000-mile journey to the moon.
What a thrill. Artemis II’s successful launch looked incredibly cool.
Nasa launched Artemis II on a historic crewed mission to the moon.
The 10-day test flight, which will not land on the moon, is a mission packed with milestones. The mission includes the first woman and first person of color to fly into cislunar space, the area between Earth’s orbit and the moon.
Artemis II’s Orion space capsule could fly them farther from Earth than any human being before them.
Polling of mission managers has concluded, officially known as the launch readiness check.
The verdict is “launch teams are ready to proceed at this time”.
Now it’s the final poll conducted by launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson. Things are good.
She said:
Reid, Victor, Christina and Jeremy, on this historic mission you take the heart of this Artemis team, the daring spirit of of the American people and our partners across the globe, and the hopes and dreams of a new generation.
Good luck, God speed Artemis II. Let’s go.
The countdown clock has resumed, lift-off in 10 minutes, at 6.35pm ET (11.35pm BST)
Mission managers have announced they are working a few issues that will delay tonight’s Artemis II launch from its original 6.24pm ET time.
Launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson says the recommendation is still to launch at some point, but we don’t yet know what new time might be provided.
Final polls of launch and ground teams are about to take place to see if tonight’s launch will happen or not. Stand by…
A welcome battery update from Nasa’s Artemis II blog:
Engineers investigated a sensor on the launch abort system’s attitude control motor controller battery that showed a higher temperature than would be expected. It is believed to be an instrumentation issue and will not affect today’s launch.
We are back on. Again.
There are two types of parallel official countdowns for Artemis II, and indeed all space missions. The terminal countdown, which reaches T-0 at lift-off, is the stop-start countdown that is currently holding at minus 10 minutes.
It marks critical milestones in the launch process, with built-in holds at preset intervals to allow certain launch-related activities and operations to take place on a schedule.
The separate launch countdown, to L-0, begins several days ahead of launch and continues ticking down regardless. In the final minutes before lift-off they finally synch, and when both reach zero the engines ignite.
A reminder that Artemis II has a two-hour launch window tonight, meaning that the scheduled 6.24pm ET time marks the opening of that window, not necessarily the exact time at which lift-off WILL occur (although that’s what Nasa is aiming for).
Here’s a live look from the Nasa News Center at Cape Canaveral, where things are buzzing again with will-they-won’t-they launch energy.
We are staying fueled with coffee and donuts. There’s a live feed on two large TVs of the Nasa launch coverage. And the wifi is holding up well, so stay tuned for more of my coverage now that we’re inside an hour of the scheduled launch time.
Sigh. Another late technical issue has cropped up, this time a problem with one of two batteries we are led to believe has something to do with the launch abort system.
As of now, it is not considered a constraint to launch. BUT… confusingly, it would be considered one within the last six minutes of the countdown, Nasa’s launch commentator Derrol Nail said.
Apparently, one of two batteries is reporting a temperature “out of range”, but engineers don’t yet know if it’s an issue with the battery itself, or just a malfunctioning sensor.
As before, mission managers are “troubleshooting the issue”, and we are awaiting an update.
In better news, the weather forecast for the the opening of the launch window at 6.24pm ET has increased to 90% favorable (from 80% earlier).
And the hatch of the Orion crew capsule has finally been closed and sealed, and the closeout crew is making its way off the launchpad.
I’ve been talking with Arizona senator and former space shuttle commander Mark Kelly, who says he would join the Artemis II crew in a heartbeat.
Kelly, who flew on four shuttle missions between 2001 and 2011, was watching the astronauts walk out from the Neil A Armstrong operations and checkout building on their way to the launchpad, a view from the other side of metal security railings from which he was used to.
“If something happens in there, they need somebody to replace one of them, I’ll be ready,” he said.
More seriously, Kelly addressed the benefit of this spaceflight to the US, and the wider world:
Us as a species, especially as a country, we’re doing something positive for humanity.
When you make a decision to climb in a rocket ship and lift off with over eight million pounds of thrust on your back, you don’t take the decision lightly.
But the upside for us as a nation is so consequential that most of us , you know, we make the calculation that it’s worth doing. There’s tremendous downside personally because of the risk involved, but for our nation there’s tremendous upside.
Here’s the update on the malfunctioning flight termination system… it’s good news. The launch attempt is officially a go.
Whatever the fix was, and mission control gave no clear details, it worked.
“It was a fix to clear the range and work the FTS. That is no longer a constraint,” Nasa’s launch commentator, Derrol Nail, has just announced.
Nail said that combined with the fact that ground systems engineers were also working no constraints, “it’s great news. The range is green and we’re continuing with the countdown”.
A quick weather update: there’s still a little “feisty” weather activity, showers and some wind nearby, but still far enough from the launch window for it not to be an issue, Nail said.
We are a little more than an hour from the launch window opening.
While we wait for news about the technical issue threatening today’s launch, let’s take a look ahead at Nasa’s big plans for the future of its Artemis program beyond this mission.
In February, the space agency’s new administrator, the billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman, announced a strategy shift for forthcoming missions, including pushing back the next human landing to the Artemis IV mission scheduled for 2028.
His plan is for a more incremental approach to launches, and a more sustainable mission timeline that will set Nasa on what he hopes will be a steadier course towards the ultimate goal of a human landing on Mars before the end of the next decade.
Then last month he followed up with another bombshell announcement: that Nasa would abandon plans for the Lunar Gateway, an orbital research and transfer station for lunar crews, and build instead a $20bn moon base.
The ambitious plans are in keeping with Donald Trump’s first-term Space Policy Directive of 2017 designed to preserve US supremacy in space, and specifically to stay ahead of China, which has sent a number of robotic landers and has plans for its own human landing before 2030.
Isaacman told reporters earlier this year:
Nasa was established to undertake big, bold endeavors in air and space, to undertake the near impossible.
Next up is America’s return to the lunar environment. What we learn from that mission is going to help enable America’s return to the lunar surface. When we arrive to the moon, we’re there to stay
Read more:
Nasa’s mission control is reporting a technical issue that is threatening Wednesday’s launch opportunity of Artemis II.
According to mission managers, there is a problem with the flight termination system (FTS), a crucial safety system designed to destroy the rocket if it veers off course or poses a safety threat.
The system uses powerful explosives, and is armed just minutes before launch as a safeguard to people on the ground.
Details are few so far, but it seems that a vital piece of equipment or component necessary for it to work properly is malfunctioning, and engineers have been despatched to find or examine a “heritage” replacement part from the space shuttle era of more than a decade ago, to see if a workaround can be found.
Many parts of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket of Artemis II are modified or reused from space shuttle parts, so the request is not as unusual as it sounds.
It’s also unclear how significant a problem this might turn out to be, certainly in terms of scrubbing tonight’s launch opportunity, but we do know from Nasa that, as things stand, it is a “no go”.
We’ll bring you more details when we find out more.
Leyland Cecco
A professor of Earth sciences at Western University, who worked with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on geological components of the Artemis II mission, has been recounting their time together.
“There’s a lot you learned about a person sharing a in a tent in the Arctic,” Gordon Osinski, also a member of the first Artemis lunar surface science team, said.
Osinski recently worked with astronauts at Nasa and the Canadian Space Agency to study a lunar impact crater in Labrador similar to what astronauts will experience on the moon.
“The most valuable thing that was brought back from the Apollo missions were the [rock] samples,” he said, noting scientists still worked on them decades later.
“In fields like geology, there’s a strong belief that the best place to learn is in the field.”
Osinski and Hansen have worked together for 15 years.
“There is a sense of trepidation. There’s a sense in which the public has grown complacent about the risks about these sorts of missions, especially because putting humans near the moon has become so rare.
“This mission is a reminder that rocket science is very difficult.”
Donald Trump has posted on social media his appreciation of the three American astronauts on board Artemis II, but did not recognize the fourth member of the crew, Canadian Jeremy Hansen.
“Tonight at 6.24pm EST [sic], for the first time in over 50 YEARS, America is going back to the Moon! Artemis II, among the most powerful rockets ever built, is launching our Brave Astronauts farther into Deep Space than any human has EVER gone,” the US president wrote on Truth Social in a trademark mix of capital letters and questionable grammar.
“We are WINNING, in Space, on Earth, and everywhere in between - Economically, Militarily, and now, BEYOND THE STARS. Nobody comes close! America doesn’t just compete, we DOMINATE, and the whole World is watching.
“God bless our incredible Astronauts, God bless NASA, and God bless the Greatest Nation ever to exist, the United States of America! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
As a minor aside, the president also has the launch time wrong. Scheduled lift-off is 6.24pm eastern daylight time, not eastern standard time, as his post states.
Artemis II and its crew of four will bridge a 54-year gap. The most recent time anybody traveled beyond lower Earth orbit were the three astronauts aboard Apollo 17 in December 1972, also the last time humans set foot on the lunar surface.
In fact, only 24 people, all Americans, have ever been as far as the moon, and only 12 of those ever landed, during six Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972.
The ill-fated Apollo 13 mission of April 1970 would have been a seventh but suffered an oxygen tank explosion and was forced to abort, prompting the famous but often incorrectly remembered phrase, “Houston, we’ve had a problem”.
Only four moonwalkers, now all in their 90s, are still alive. The most famous is Buzz Aldrin, 96, who joined the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, on the “one giant leap for mankind” Apollo 11 landing in July 1969.
David Scott, 93, (Apollo 15, July-August 1971); Charles Duke, 90, (Apollo 16, April 1972); and Harrison Schmitt, 90, (Apollo 17, December 1972) are the only other survivors.
Waning public interest and budgetary constraints led President Richard Nixon to announce in 1970 that the Apollo program was to be abandoned, and its three final moon landing missions canceled.