Artemis III Scientist Shares What to Expect From NASA’s Next Lunar Mission

For years, NASA hoped to bring humans back to the moon’s surface, and Artemis III was going to be the mission to accomplish this feat. That will no longer be the case.

Following the successful Artemis II flyby last April, the program’s schedule was revised. According to the most recent announcements, the next mission will have to wait until 2028, and while the new plans are admittedly less spectacular than a lunar landing, they’re hardly dispensable.

In 2027, NASA plans to test in Earth orbit whether the Orion capsule can safely rendezvous and operate with commercial lunar landing systems from SpaceX and Blue Origin before attempting those same maneuvers around the moon. WIRED en Español spoke with Barbara Cohen, a scientist on the Artemis III project, to better understand this upcoming mission—the conversation ranging from the role humans still play in the face of increasingly capable robots and sensors to what we can learn about the solar system’s violent past from traces preserved on the moon.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

JORGE GARAY: What should people expect from Artemis III, and why does this mission matter even if it won’t land astronauts on the moon?

BARBARA COHEN: Artemis III is an Earth-orbiting mission. That’s the one that’s coming up next. We will send the Orion capsule to Earth’s orbit with the people in it. Blue Origin and SpaceX are the companies that are making the lunar landers, so each one of those companies will make a test article. It won’t be the full lunar lander, but those companies will send their version of the test article into Earth’s orbit to meet up with Orion. This is to make sure that Orion can meet with the lunar landers, so that when they do go to lunar orbit, they can do that safely.

Where does science fit into the Artemis program, and what have you learned so far about how astronauts can contribute scientifically?

The Artemis missions, just to be clear, are not science missions. They’re exploration for a lot of different reasons. We do that for technology development. We do that for inspiration. And we try to get the science that we can from the opportunity. And so we still work really hard to identify unique science opportunities that exist because the mission exists.

One of the things on Artemis III we’re doing is like a dress rehearsal for bringing samples back from the moon. When we land on the moon and start to bring samples back, those samples change as soon as you take them out of their natural environment. We try to make sure that they change as little as possible, but they are going to change.

You have to bring them back and put them into curation so that scientists can study them. We want to understand every step along the way: What could be changing the samples, how the samples could be reacting, especially to the environment around them. So we’ll have our crew deploy these witness materials—pieces of aluminum foil, pieces of Teflon, maybe pieces of ceramic. They’re very clean surfaces, very small pieces, maybe the size of a quarter or a nickel. And the team will be opening those up and exposing them to the crew cabin throughout their flight. That’ll give us a feel for how the humans change the environment around them.

With the capabilities of probes and other robotic tools today, what is the purpose of sending human astronauts into space?

If you just want to take pictures, you do that with robotic assets. Robots can take pictures. They do that all the time. We have lots of pictures in the area. We also have, on the International Space Station, a way for us to ask, “Please take a picture of this. Please take a picture of that.” That’s not what we did with Artemis II, and that’s not what we’re trying to do with Artemis III or Artemis IV, V, VI. With the Artemis missions, we’re trying to use the humans to their best capability, and what the humans are really good at is seeing a wide scene, zooming in on details very naturally, and then trying to interpret what they’re seeing and take the next step.

We don’t know everything about the moon. To learn more, we need to literally go on the surface and figure out what’s there and where to go next. So some of this is trying to train—not just the crew onboard—but the flight directors and the science team and the engineers. We all need to work together to enable humans to do what they do best.

We also give the crew science prompts. We say, “What do you think is happening in this scene? There’s something like a storm or an algal bloom or a fire. What do you see? How do you see the scene changing? What do you think that means? What do you think is causing that change? What do you think is going to happen next? If you could do anything, what would you do next?” That helps us understand what they’re looking at, which is not just taking pictures. It’s making observations, making understanding, making inferences with their brains. That’s what humans are really good at. That’s what we’ll be asking them to do.

From a science point of view, we learned a lot about how crew really wants to use their powers of observation, and how we should participate in the observations and train them in the science that we want them to do. We also had the ability to include science directly in flight. On Artemis II, we had our science officer talk directly to crew. That was a new thing that we’ll be carrying forward to Artemis III and beyond.

When humans return to the lunar surface, what scientific questions would you most like Artemis to help answer?

I have a personal opinion. My personal scientific interest is how old craters on the moon are. If you look at the moon—with binoculars or a small telescope, or even in pictures—you see that it is covered in craters. In fact, we call it saturated, because every crater that forms does so on another crater. The whole surface is covered in craters. The Earth is not, but I promise you that for every crater that formed on the moon, there was a crater that formed on Earth.

The moon doesn’t get hit more than the Earth, but we have a lot of water. We have erosion on our continents. Our continents move around. They get subducted. We get new land that forms. All of those processes on the Earth erase craters. And so, if we want to know what was hitting the Earth in the past—and I promise you that things were hitting the Earth—we can’t find that evidence on the Earth anymore. We’ve erased it. So we have to go to the moon to figure that out.

There was a period in time when the solar system was forming—4.5 billion years ago, 4 billion years ago. Humans weren’t around. Life hadn’t arisen on Earth yet. We think that the solar system was very dynamic, and there were a lot of impacts happening, a lot of material being exchanged. So there were a lot of craters—big, big craters, basin-size craters, craters the size of continents. They really disrupted the moon, and they would have disrupted the Earth as well. Like I said, we don’t have any evidence of that because we don’t have any rocks from that time anymore. But it’s really worth knowing. Did we disrupt the Earth several times? How did life get going? How did we get nutrients? How did material move around the solar system? That evidence is preserved on the moon.

There is a big crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin. It’s on the lunar far side, but it intersects the South Pole of the moon, where we expect humans to be going. It would be my personal desire that humans could collect pieces of that big crater, and we could understand when it formed and what it did to the moon and what was happening in the solar system at that time.

Artemis III won’t do that just yet. Lunar touchdown is currently expected as part of Artemis IV, which is expected to take off in early 2028. Before then, the upcoming third mission will have to demonstrate something far less spectacular, but crucial for the program’s future: That the spacecraft, procedures, and the people who will one day carry out these missions can work together safely.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.