Weather of Arabia - Yesterday, Monday, the US space agency "NASA" revealed the names of a team of four astronauts, on its first manned flight to the moon after an absence of more than 50 years, and the team includes the first woman, as well as the first African American to be sent on a mission to the moon.
The agency chose Christina Cook, an engineer who has been named the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman. She participated in the first three all-female spacewalks for NASA. Cook will be a specialist on the Artemis 2 mission, which is scheduled to start early next year.
She will be joined by Victor Glover, a US Navy pilot who participated in four spacewalks and was selected by NASA to pilot the Artemis 2 mission. Glover will be the first-ever black astronaut sent on a mission to the moon.
Jeremy Hansen, a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force and the first Canadian ever selected for a flight to the Moon, was also selected as a specialist for the mission. Reed Wiseman, another former US Navy fighter pilot, was named commander of the Artemis 2 mission.
The three NASA astronauts selected for the Artemis 2 mission have participated in previous missions aboard the International Space Station. While Hansen is experiencing for the first time.
The four astronauts were announced during a gathering of reporters, local elementary school students and space industry leaders that was televised from Johnson Space Center, NASA's Mission Control Base in Houston.
"The Artemis 2 crew represents the thousands of people who work tirelessly to reach the stars... This crew is (on behalf of) humanity," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told the audience.
The Artemis 2 mission will mark the first manned flight, but not the first moon landing, for a program that aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface this decade and establish a sustainable site there, providing a springboard for human exploration of Mars.
The first "Artemis" mission was successfully completed in December 2022, and NASA crowned the mission successfully after launching its first next-generation rocket, which was huge and super-capable, and its newly built Orion spacecraft on an unmanned 25-day test flight.
As for the "Artemis 2" mission, it is scheduled to launch in November 2024, last for 10 days, and extend for a distance of 2.3 million kilometers to fly around the moon and then return, and its aim is to prove that all Orion spacecraft devices related to life support and other systems will work on The way it was designed with astronauts on board in deep space.
According to the plan, the "Artemis 2" mission will venture 10,300 kilometers beyond the far side of the moon before returning, the lowest distance humans have approached the moon since the Apollo 17 mission that carried Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt to the lunar surface in December 1972.
They were the last of 12 astronauts to walk on the moon during six of the missions of the "Apollo" program that began in 1969 with Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin.
In the furthest distance from Earth, the "Artemis 2" mission is expected to reach a point more than 370,000 km away.
The journey into space will culminate with the orbit of the Orion spacecraft around the moon, and then using both the gravity of the earth and the moon to return it to Earth on a journey that takes about four more days, and ends with a fall into the sea water.
And if the Artemis 2 mission is successful, NASA intends, after a few years, to carry out the first landing of astronauts, including a woman, on the surface of the moon within this program, but within the framework of the Artemis 3 mission, and then continue to launch one manned flight almost every year.
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