New Zealand is trumpeting its role in a plan to return humans to the moon, saying it is set to star in NASA’s Capstone mission that would test the orbit for a lunar space station.
Rocket Lab has announced that it is to launch a satellite from Mahia, New Zealand, to test the lunar orbit for Gateway, a planned moon-orbiting outpost that would provide astronauts with access to the lunar surface.
Separately, New Zealand’s government yesterday said that it has signed an agreement with NASA to conduct new research to track spacecraft approaching and orbiting the moon.
“The New Zealand space sector is set to star in NASA’s Capstone Moon mission,” New Zealand Space Agency Manager Andrew Johnson said.
Launching into lunar orbit from New Zealand is “a significant milestone,” while the new research “will be increasingly important as more countries and private actors send spacecraft to the Moon,” he said.
NASA’s Artemis Program plans to return humans to the lunar surface as early as 2025, renewing human exploration of the moon and progressing toward the exploration of Mars. It plans to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon and explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.
Rocket Lab said it could launch the cubesat as soon as today, with the launch window open through July 27.
The announcement came the day after NASA launched the first of three sounding rockets from a facility in Australia’s Northern Territory, the first time the space agency has used a commercial launchpad outside of the US in its more than 50-year history.
The remaining rocket launches from the Arnhem Space Centre would be completed by July 12.
“Space is really going through a renaissance,” Enrico Palermo, head of the Australian Space Agency, told Bloomberg Television yesterday. “We’ve seen entities like SpaceX rapidly drop the cost of getting technology to space. The barriers to do stuff in space are so, so much lower.”
New Zealand’s agreement with NASA would see a University of Canterbury-led research team, which includes contributors from the University of Auckland and the University of New South Wales in Australia, attempt to track spacecraft from observatories in Tekapo, New Zealand, and Canberra.
The scientists intend to validate their observations and algorithms to predict spacecraft trajectories enroute to the moon and within their lunar orbits against NASA’s Capstone mission data.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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