Nasa reveals date for Moon mission THIS month that will lead way for first woman on lunar surface

NASA has revealed some very important dates for Moon missions that should be happening this year.

The US space agency hopes to send a rocket around the Moon in May or June of 2022 but that all depends on the success of a ‘mini mission’ this month.

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Nasa’s 2022 mission to the Moon is called Artemis 1.

It will be testing out hardware so that Nasa can land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon by 2025.

That crewed mission is being referred to as Artemis 3 and a lot has to happen before it can take place.

Before Artemis 1 can launch, Nasa wants to do a test run this month.

The test will be a full “wet” dress rehearsal on March 17.

Artemis 1 isn’t a crewed mission but it needs to loop around the Moon to test three key components.

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These are Nasa’s Space Launch System (SLS), its Orion spacecraft, and the European Service Module (ESM).

The Orion spacecraft and the ESM should get within 62 miles of the lunar surface and then travel 40,000 miles beyond this.

It will take about three weeks for it to complete the mission and land in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego.

On March 17, Nasa will be acting like it’s about to launch the Artemis 1 mission.

All the equipment will be rolled out to the launchpad at 6pm ET.

Propellant will be added to the rocket tanks and a full launch countdown will take place.

However, Nasa’s SLS and Orion spacecraft won’t be going anywhere.

How the equipment behaves will determine when Artemis 1 can actually take off.

Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at Nasa, said: “The agency is waiting to for the wet dress rehearsal to see how we’re doing … we’ll set the launch date at that point.

“We continue to evaluate the May launch window, but we recognize that there’s a lot of work in front of us and we need to make sure we get through that testing and evaluation activity before we set a launch commitment date.”

If all goes to plan, all the equipment will be wheeled back into the Vehicle Assembly Building and a launch date will finally be set.

This could be almost any time in May, June or early July.

It all depends on weather conditions and where the Moon is in its lunar cycle.

Possible launch windows are May 7-21, June 6-16, June 29-July 1 and July 5-12 of this year.

In other news, Nasa’s Curiosity rover has discovered a strange rock on Mars that looks just like a flower or a piece of coral here on Earth.

The US space agency revealed a stunning image of an unusual ‘space triangle’ it was able to capture with the Hubble Space Telescope.

And, we looked into what would happen if you died in space.

This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk