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Destination Moon
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00:03On the 1st of April, 2026, Artemis II launched into space.
00:15The first crewed mission in over 50 years heading back to the moon.
00:20It's a place that has been special to me ever since I was young.
00:24I've always declared myself as a self-certified lunatic.
00:31I mean, what's not to love?
00:33It's always beautiful in the night sky and sometimes it feels so close you could almost touch it.
00:39So imagine my excitement when they announced that we're sending people back there.
00:45The journey of Artemis II around the moon is a historic moment in the current race to get back to
00:51the surface.
00:52And maybe one day beyond to other worlds.
00:57So tonight we're diving in to what it actually takes to get back to the moon.
01:02What are the challenges we're facing in the new lunar race?
01:05And what we're already learning as we make that journey.
01:09Welcome to the Sky at Night.
01:13The Sky at Night.
01:41I'm going to tell you
01:42the story of our moon but to do that we're going to go back some four and a half billion
01:46years
01:47but don't worry highlights only now at the time our solar system was filled with swirling gas
01:53and dust and there was constant collisions going on in all of that mess the planets were forming
02:00now it's believed that in this chaos a mile-sized object called fear struck the young nascent earth
02:07in what scientists call the giant impact
02:12from the debris of this collision two worlds were formed earth and the moon so these siblings
02:19traveled through the galaxy together as constant companions with gravity shaping their partnership
02:25and keeping them together now fast forward again a few billion years and humans evolved after
02:31thousands of years of looking up at the moon with wonder technological advances meant that we could
02:37finally start to dream about reaching out and touching the moon and so in the 1950s the first
02:44space race began
02:50now the soviets were the first to get a person into orbit but it was the nasa apollo missions that
02:57led the way in the race to the lunar surface but it wasn't the one giant leap that we all
03:03remember
03:04apollo 1 was a sad and terrible disaster but they learned from it they redesigned the spacecraft they did so
03:13much testing and so we continued to inch closer and closer until apollo 8 so this was the first time
03:22that they
03:22successfully got humans in orbit around the moon
03:26this was followed soon after by apollo 11 and five subsequent missions that successfully landed crews on the moon's surface
03:39roger the eva is progressing beautifully they're setting up the flag now and then in 1972 it all just stopped
03:50but today over 50 years on there's a new race to the moon and while china's changi mission has been
03:58leading
03:58the way with landers and sample returns it's nasa's artemis mission that has just taken a huge leap forward
04:06just as apollo before it the artemis program hasn't been plain sailing
04:12artemis 1 was an uncrued test flight using nasa's new sls its space launch system the most powerful rocket
04:22they have ever built
04:25this new system pushed through engineering delays and a global pandemic before finally looping around the moon
04:33in 2022 then came artemis 2 again delayed by years then months then weeks it finally launched four crew
04:43members including the first woman the first black person and the first non-american on a 10-day journey
04:49of nearly 700 000 miles around the moon and back the flight path for artemis 2 travels 4 600 miles
05:00beyond the far side of the moon further than any human has ever been before
05:06and it's incredible to think where these astronauts have been
05:14while it's exciting for us watching on i'm meeting one of the few people on earth who knows what it's
05:20like to go into space
05:24in 1991 helen shaman blasted off on a soya's rocket for an eight-day mission becoming britain's first astronaut
05:32if anyone can help me understand what it's like to go into space it's her
05:39i'm at imperial college london's space engineering laboratory to meet helen who is now a uk outreach ambassador here
05:48now of course you are an astronaut yourself um so what is it like actually going into space
05:56this is just a really thrilling moment when you realize that actually there is only one way off that rocket
06:02and it's going to be for you it's going to be up into space right and one of these artemis
06:06astronauts
06:06it will be his first time ever in space it'll be his first ever real launch experience and although we
06:13can train
06:13and do tests in a centrifuge where we're spun around a room and you don't hear the bumps and the
06:18bangs
06:18you don't feel the jolts but no the most thrilling moment actually is when the fairing is jettisoned
06:24so this of course is a protective layer that we put around a rocket and the spacecraft to stop us
06:29from
06:29being damaged by the atmosphere as we go through it and as soon as that fairing is jettisoned
06:34then light streams through the window and if you are lucky you get the view of the earth and yes
06:40so in my launch
06:41yes i was sort of my window was facing towards the earth um so i could see the the earth's
06:47horizon
06:47of course we were still launching we're still getting further and further away but there was that blue horizon
06:52there was the black of space above uh yeah so thrilling i mean those views sound incredible
06:57after the apollo era there was just a dip in interest in the moon we haven't been for such a
07:02long time
07:02why now there's always been science science about the moon to learn science that we can do while we're on
07:09the moon
07:09and that's not changed although science has developed of course um but i think what's happening
07:14now is that there is first of all um a sort of the promise of what could be a lunar
07:19economy and everybody
07:21wants to have a bit of that because it's actually you know forecast to be billions of dollars actually
07:25by sort of 2040s um but also of course there are other countries involved china has stated a desire to
07:33not just land astronauts on the moon but to actually have operations then there is this really strategic
07:38part of the moon and it's the south pole now if a country establishes a big enough operation there
07:45they could get the best bits of the moon as well as this part of the moon which is not
07:50only you know
07:50it's based in sunlight if you go to the room of the crater most of the time so you can
07:54power your equipment
07:55we've got water ice there the astronauts and for equipment for making rocket fuel and possibly mining
08:01some of the rare earths there as well so a whole load of stuff of reasons actually to want to
08:07go to
08:07the moon and to go to the moon quickly now we've got this political race all over again so are
08:13we then
08:13in another space race i think we are um it's a space race now to get to the south pole
08:20of the moon
08:23water and power are essential for any lasting lunar base and although being first grabs headlines
08:29countries are really chasing long-term footholds what are your hopes for the future of human space
08:37exploration oh you know i think what i really want to see is that international cooperation so we're not
08:45just fighting each other to get the best bits of space and mining an asteroid and claiming it is ours
08:50i want us to see us using that for the benefit of the earth you don't want to establish operations
08:55let's say it is mining that's likely to be you know have quite a few vibrations uh in an area
08:59that
08:59that's maybe the best place to do some astronomy you know somebody let's say radio astronomy something
09:05like that where you need a lovely stable base for it so yes i think we need that cooperation
09:11humans are just basically curious we want to explore and find out more and if we can sort out all
09:18of the
09:19the operational stuff and the practicalities the stars really are our limit while artemis 2 tests
09:27out the space technology that hopes to land humans on the moon our lunar future is also being driven
09:34steadily forward by remote and robotic missions one man at the heart of this is space instrument engineer
09:42simian barber can you tell me what you're working on at the moment at the moment i'm working on a
09:48mission
09:48called prospect this is a european space agency project to develop a drill and a sample analysis
09:55package to go on a lunar lander in a couple of years time it will land near the south pole
10:01of the moon
10:01and we're looking to understand can we find water ice there buried beneath the surface so you're using
10:08a drill to go below the surface yeah so we want to get to about a meter below the surface
10:14because these
10:15are the depths that are probed by orbiters that have suggested that there might be concentrations of water
10:22at the poles but they're just remote sensing measurements it's very difficult to know how accurate those
10:28measurements are so we're trying to get this survey of what is below the surface but of the many
10:36uncrewed missions to the moon over the last few years there have been about as many failures as successes
10:44so why are we finding it so hard when we had humans on the surface over 50 years ago
10:54so remember that neil armstrong did amazing things he was steering it down he was steering
11:00that spacecraft and when he didn't like the look of the landing site he flew to a safer place and
11:05landed with just seconds of fuel left the eagle has landed humans are able to do that at the moment
11:12now
11:12we're doing robotic landings and they're mainly based on vision-based navigation so there are cameras
11:18looking at the terrain comparing it to maps they have in their memory the problem we've had recently
11:23is that particularly near the south pole it's actually really difficult because the sun is always
11:28very low in the sky and you get very long shadows yes and it means that the maps that the
11:35cameras are
11:36using are very susceptible to changes in angles of illumination from the sun so these vision-based
11:41systems are really getting confused by the environment so we have had a number of failures but are
11:47lessons learned from these failures yeah there's always lessons learned and you learn by doing i'm
11:52a great believer in that so what's actually happening at the moment is that nasa has has kind of catalyzed
11:58a new breed of commercial companies so they've they've put out contracts and said we would like to buy
12:06services which will deliver as a payload to the south pole of the moon or to the equator and we're
12:12going
12:12to pay this amount of money who would like to bid and they've created this kind of competitive
12:16environment and the overall idea is that we try and come up with a new way of doing space exploration
12:21rather than sort of having sort of one big mission where you've put everything into it
12:25you're trying sort of smaller missions but many of them and then learning as we go along yeah that's
12:31exactly what's happening so the idea is you try often you you if you're going to fail you fail early
12:36you learn from that and then you go again so these missions are all robotic you know no one dies
12:41if the
12:41mission goes wrong it's one of the challenges with robotic missions is miniaturization um launching
12:47things into space is incredibly expensive yeah so literally gravity has held us back you know that
12:53that's why we're on earth with because of gravity and and that's as a space scientist that's your enemy
12:58and interesting enough there there have been calculations recently saying that to get a
13:03kilogram of any kind of payload to the surface of the moon costs on the order of a million euros
13:09or
13:10pounds or dollars you know your currency of choice that the one million is the key thing yeah so that
13:16means you know every few grams we can save here and there is really really worthwhile so to give
13:21one example this device is a mass spectrometer so it's like a weighing machine for atoms on the moon
13:28now this kind of device would be you know huge in a laboratory would be the size of a
13:34you know microwave oven at least so this is a scale model this is actually the mass spectrometer
13:38this is a real working instrument so by miniaturizing it to this size which is about 100
13:43grams it's more acceptable to a spacecraft to have it on board and it also means it's quite sensitive
13:49when you make things smaller can become quite sensitive so the performance can improve as well
13:53so the technology evolves but it's based on things that we've done before in traditional space at least
13:58we tend to be quite conservative of course what's happening now with the moon and that there are more
14:03missions going and they tend to be faster and cheaper it does mean you can take more risks
14:08because you get more opportunities it's a new way of building instruments and allows us to be a bit
14:13more adventurous and then try things push the boundaries a bit
14:19while organizations like nasa and isa are looking at a new approach to space exploration
14:25china's space program is also breaking new lunar ground
14:29before 1959 we had no idea what was on the far side of the moon it could have been literally
14:35anything to the delight of science fiction writers and the occasional conspiracy theorist as well but
14:41then the soviets sent their lunar 3 probe around the moon sending back the first blurred pictures
14:47of the far side and this is that first picture showing the full disk of the far side even though
14:53the quality isn't great you can see that it's different from the familiar near side that you
14:58see when you look up from here on earth the modern images make the comparison obvious the near side
15:04has these dark round features which we call seas but they're almost entirely missing on the far side
15:11which instead has this fractured scarred cratered surface so the two sides of the moon look very
15:18different it was a surprising result then and it's a fact that's puzzled astronomers ever since
15:26decades of remote analysis have given us a deeper understanding of the moon revealing a more
15:31complex world than once suspected the crust is thicker on the far side and a collection of heat
15:37producing elements known as creep cluster on the near side so why is the moon so uneven
15:45with only apollo samples available all of them from the near side the answer remained out of reach until
15:52now in 2024 china's chang'e 6 collected and returned to earth the first ever sample from the lunar far
16:01side
16:02scientists have been excitedly analyzing it ever since and one of them is just along the corridor
16:13geochemist yang lee is based at peking university and affiliated with university college london
16:19he's one of only a few people to have held the far side of the moon in his hands can
16:25you talk us through
16:27when you first saw the sample and what it was like it's very exciting of course so when you hold
16:32these samples you know you know this are from the far side of the moon this is the first time
16:36human
16:37beings ever hold a sample in hand yeah at the same time this is a big responsibility because everyone
16:42wants to know what you are going to get from these samples yeah so with that responsibility was it a
16:49big
16:49effort to try and get these results i lead a young group we pretty much worked around the clock we
16:54never
16:54felt tired because you always get new things and you always want to know more it feels like you were
17:00on
17:00a lunar mission yourself so tell us about this sample what have you found out about this particular
17:05piece of the moon the first thing we do is we dated that by uranium lead dating so which is
17:12based on the
17:12decay of uranium to lead and then we get an age of 2.8 billion years old so this is
17:18relatively late in
17:19lunar history yeah it's something like it's middle age great so we know the age of the sample now you
17:24were able to say something about the temperature at which it formed yeah once we know the age what we
17:29do is we use both geochemical analysis and and petrological modeling we realize the the mantle from
17:38the far side is 100 celsius degrees colder than is comparable mental source from the near side
17:48analysis of the sample produced an incredible discovery real insight into what was happening on the
17:54moon's far side some 2.8 billion years ago and by comparing it with apollo's near side samples
18:02we discover a difference of 100 degrees celsius existed in the past just below the surface
18:10to understand why we need to look further back when the moon was still cooling and its crust slowly forming
18:17a leftover mix rich in potassium rare earth elements and phosphorus known as creep was still fluid beneath
18:24the surface and because creep isn't spread evenly around the moon today it may hold the key to its
18:32lopsided past
18:35so once you have this creep you know you at that time if you have uh impact happen at that
18:42right
18:42time when the creep is near molten you can push that creep from one side to the other side
18:49so it's literally something smashing into the moon and this material gets moved around yes
18:54so what's interesting about this idea for me is i think i'd assumed that when you talk about the difference
18:59between the near side and the far side that it must have something to do with the earth actually
19:03there is a hypothesis consider considering the earth's role in generating this to face the moon
19:10okay yeah so when the earth and the moon was newly formed the earth is also hot at the time
19:17so the side facing the earth potentially can have more radiation height from the earth to the moon
19:24ah okay yeah so it's the earth that's heating the moon potentially yeah so there are different
19:29hypotheses trying to explain why the moon have two dramatic different faces it's possible that both
19:36this creep and the earth shine are working at the same time we need more missions there and more
19:43samples yeah well i'm all in favor of more missions we haven't quite solved the moon's two-sided mystery
19:51yet but the view from billions of years ago of both sides is getting us closer
19:59while many dream of a future era of lunar exploration with boots on the ground it's happening
20:04already with missions like this one we're learning more about the complex surprisingly dynamic history
20:10of our nearest neighbor and ultimately whether it's robots or humans collecting it we just want more data
20:19could the artemis program be on track to get us a step closer eight days before launch i was lucky
20:27enough to speak with kelsey young who leads the nasa missions lunar science campaign i asked her about
20:34her hopes for the mission artemis 2 is of course you know first and foremost a test flight we want
20:39to
20:39launch our crew members safely and get them home so i'm really excited about the lunar science component
20:44of this mission and what our trained crew members and the orion vehicle cameras will be able to do for
20:49us so what sort of training have they had when astronauts are first selected as astronaut candidates
20:53they actually as a part of their initial two-year astronaut candidate training flow get four weeks
20:59of geology training two weeks in the classroom and two weeks in the field but beyond that when they're
21:04assigned we again had them back in the classroom can't escape that classroom training we've taken
21:08them out into the highlands of iceland because it's a really lunar-like terrain and then really
21:14critically and especially lately we've been working with them repeatedly in mission simulations we
21:20actually have them able to practice using the cameras practice giving the descriptions of the moon
21:25and practice all of that in a flight-like environment so they're going to be traveling over
21:29four and a half thousand uh miles from the far side of the moon what sort of details can they
21:35see from
21:35that distance it's a really unique vantage point you know apollo missions flew much much closer to the
21:40lunar surface artemis 2 as you point out will be much farther away it will be about the size of
21:46a
21:46basketball held at arm's length to the crew um so if you you know pick up your nearest basketball
21:51hold it out at arm's length that will be about the size of what the moon will appear to the
21:56astronauts
21:57with the unaided eye and actually you know there's really interesting science that we can gain from
22:02that unique perspective first of all there are massive chunks of the lunar far side that human
22:08beings have never actually seen before this is because of the unique trajectories that the apollo
22:13astronauts did fly and that's really interesting scientifically for a few reasons one of them
22:18my scientific background is impact cratering and impact craters can actually toss material hundreds if not
22:26thousands of kilometers across the lunar surface so you know an impact feature that forms in the
22:32northern hemisphere of the moon can influence the southern hemisphere because it can toss material that
22:37far away so having crew members have that whole disc view actually enables them to contextualize things
22:44they see across the entire disc in a way that we did not get those crew observations in apollo but
22:50then
22:50they also have an 80 to 400 millimeter zoom lens on board for one of their cameras that allows them
22:57to
22:57zoom into the micro right to use that zoom lens to interrogate features of interest that are really
23:02compelling for science the examples that i really am excited about are color color and albedo so actually
23:09using the human eyeball which is an incredibly robust detector to really describe nuanced color details across the
23:18entire disk of the moon so understanding you know this region looks like it has an orange hue and because
23:24of that we might understand what processes were active in that section of the moon when so i'm really
23:30excited to get that data back and there go the first series of parachutes after traveling further into space
23:43than any human being in history the artemis 2 journey ended with a safe splashdown on the 10th of april
23:52splashdown confirmed welcome home i can't wait to find out what we've learned from this historic mission
24:00and these incredible explorers
24:08but while we wait for more data from robots or astronauts pete's here to remind us of the simple
24:14joy moon gazing can provide for us here on earth humans have been looking up at the moon for centuries
24:21it's mysterious markings providing inspiration for mythology all around the world with cultures
24:28seeing a man a rabbit a frog and in modern times even a basketball player so what are those formations
24:37that we can see with the naked eye let's start with the large dark areas once thought to be seas
24:44they're called maria and created by lava flowing into basins to form iron rich volcanic rock that doesn't
24:51reflect much light prominent ones to look out for are oceanus prosalarum the ocean of storms
24:59mere imbrium sea of showers with a distinctive semi-circular bay known as sinus iridum the bay of rainbows
25:09mere chrysium the sea of crises
25:13mere serenitatis the sea of serenity and mere tranquilitatis the sea of tranquility
25:21where apollo 11 made its historic landing in 1969
25:27the bright areas in between these features are known as the highlands and represent the oldest
25:32surface of the moon one standout feature in the south is the impressive tycho crater whose
25:40beautiful rays were created by material that was ejected from the impact that formed it these spread
25:47out virtually across the whole moon the full moon is always impressive to the naked eye
25:54but the direct lighting angle hides its rough and battered surface to see these relief features the
26:01light has to come in at a shallow angle i can demonstrate this by shining a torch onto this 3d
26:08printed
26:08model of the crater copernicus if i shine it on directly you can't see much detail but if i move
26:14the
26:15torch around so the light is coming in obliquely you can see the shadows which define all the surface structure
26:22incoming sunlight is most oblique near where the illuminated part of the moon meets the part which
26:27is dark that's a line dividing the moon's night and day and it's known as the lunar terminator
26:35and it's here with binoculars the details really pop great targets to start with are the craters copernicus
26:45plato and tycho if you have a small telescope additional features can be seen and here my picks would be
26:52the amazing monts apaninus the distinctive valis alps
27:02and of course the wonderful clavius crater which contains many additional craterlets within its walls
27:12even if you don't have a telescope just keep looking up at the moon and watch how its surface
27:18surface and features change from day to day you never know you may become hooked and want to
27:25progress your lunar journey by moving on to taking photographs of the moon capturing stunning images
27:31images like these which have been sent in to our flickr account
27:51but we have to end on some of the stunning images taken as artemis 2 journeyed around the moon
28:01including those of this beautiful and delicate planet that we all call home
28:10wherever our exploration of the moon takes us and no matter how long it takes to get people back to
28:16the surface one thing is clear the renewed global interest in lunar exploration will give us a better
28:23understanding of the origins of the moon and allow us to travel further than ever before so i'll keep
28:30on dreaming about landing one day on the lunar surface and in the meantime i'll keep looking up at that
28:37beautiful orb in the sky that orb that has shone down on earth for billions of years good night
28:57so
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