World’s first SPACE hike coming as Nasa plans 10-mile astronaut trek across the Moon in 2024
NEW details about Nasa’s Artemis Moon mission have revealed that the astronauts are in for a pretty long moonwalk.
Once they reach the surface, one plan is for them to walk 10 miles in a single excursion.
This is over 16 times further than how far the first men to land on the Moon walked.
Back in 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong ventured only about 3,300 feet (0.6miles) outside their lunar lander.
The Artemis mission is scheduled to land on the icy south-pole of the Moon in 2024.
Amongst other things, the astronauts will be looking for Moon ice and water.
A long moonwalk could help them spot new things in the landscape and aid this water search.
Such a long excursion will come with lots of risks.
Walking 10 miles on planet Earth is tiring enough.
However, Nasa is said to be putting a lot of faith into upgraded space suits.
They will need to be able to withstand the coldness of the Moon.
Nasa hasn’t revealed how long it expects astronauts to walk this distance in but we know Apollo astronauts had a walking speed of around 1.4 miles per hour.
At this speed it would take just over seven hours to walk 10 miles.
It takes longer to walk a mile on the Moon than on Earth because of lower gravity.
However, the Apollo astronauts were wearing heavy space suits that weren’t really designed for long distance so this could have slowed them down.
The new suit is referred to as a Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU).
It’s based on suits worn on the International Space Station as well as ones worn on Apollo missions.
Nasa hasn’t landed astronauts on the Moon since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.
NASA EVA systems engineer Natalie Mary said in a recent committee meeting: “This is where we’re going to test out technologies, utilise lessons learned from EMU and obviously Apollo, in order to get to 2024.
“We do have some things that we are holding off [on] for sustained lunar [exploration].”
The Moon – our closest neighbour explained
Here's what you need to know...
- The Moon is a natural satellite – a space-faring body that orbits a planet
- It’s Earth’s only natural satellite, and is the fifth biggest in the Solar System
- The Moon measures 2,158 miles across, roughly 0.27 times the diameter of Earth
- Temperatures on the Moon range from minus 173 degrees Celcius to 260 degrees Celcius
- Experts assumed the Moon was another planet, until Nicolaus Copernicus outlined his theory about our Solar System in 1543
- It was eventually assigned to a “class” after Galileo discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610
- The Moon is believed to have formed around 4.51billion years ago
- The strength of its gravitational field is about a sixth of Earth’s gravity
- Earth and the Moon have “synchronous rotation”, which means we always see the same side of the Moon – hence the phrase “dark side of the Moon”
- The Moon’s surface is actually dark, but appears bright in the sky due to its reflective ground
- During a solar eclipse, the Moon covers the Sun almost completely. Both objects appear a similar size in the sky because the Sun is both 400 times larger and farther
- The first spacecraft to reach the Moon was in 1959, as part of the Soviet Union’s Lunar program
- The first manned orbital mission was Nasa’s Apollo 8 in 1968
- And the first manned lunar landing was in 1969, as part of the Apollo 11 mission
In other news, Pluto may be hiding a vast ancient ocean that formed 4.5billion years ago.
Scientists think they’ve found a potentially habitable exoplanet.
And, Elon Musk has said SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which he hopes will put Americans on Mars, is now the company’s “top priority”.
What are your thoughts on the proposed moonwalk? Let us know in the comments…
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