Landing on the Moon will soon be like landing at Guarulhos airport – 03/03/2024 – Mensageiro Sideral

Our relationship with the Moon will have to change. Until today, she was mainly a star who caused us enchantment, inspiration and a good dose of mysticism. But we are already on the path to making the Moon something else – a place that we will visit and explore (in every way) frequently.

This February, which has just ended, we saw the Japanese unmanned module Slim awaken from its lunar night sleep and send new data to Earth — something unexpected, given the brutal temperature variation to which the equipment was subjected during the approximately 14 days when sunlight did not fall on that region. More importantly, on the 22nd, we saw the first landing of a private spacecraft on the Moon. The target was the region of the lunar south pole, coveted for the presence of water in the form of ice at the bottom of dark craters.

The saga of Odysseus, the lunar module from the American company Intuitive Machines, lived up to its name inspired by Homer’s epic. In the little more than seven days it took to cross the distance that separates us from our natural satellite, the team responsible for the probe faced major setbacks – the biggest of which was a failure of its laser altimeter. In just two hours, engineers had to improvise a way to use lasers from another instrument on board to measure the distance to the ground.

The effort ended up not working. Still, Odysseus performed its landing solely based on the image recognition system. She went down a little faster than expected, with some lateral speed, which caused her to break one of her legs when she touched the ground and, finally, fall. Even though it crashed, the module remained operational and managed to activate all the scientific instruments that NASA shipped with it (at a cost of US$118 million), in addition to other private payloads. Now the controllers will keep an eye on whether, like the Japanese probe, when the sun’s rays fall on the panels again, the Odysseus will wake up from its sleep, in two to three weeks.

That was just in February. Intuitive Machines intends to carry out two more flights to the Moon in 2024. Another American company, Firefly, also has a flight scheduled for this year. Japanese ispace, which failed its first landing in 2023, will try again this year. And the American Astrobotic, which had problems with its pioneering launch in January and didn’t even attempt a landing, could return to the load later this year as well. Apart from the Chinese, who with their state lunar program intend to carry out the first collection of samples from the far side of the Moon in May, with the Chang’e 6 mission.

The next few years should be similar, and these flights will be precursors to future manned missions to the surface. Summary of the opera: we’re going to get sick of seeing landings on the Moon. It’s going to be a little like seeing a plane land in Guarulhos. Our satellite will be, for the first time, sustainably within constant reach of robotic and human visitors.

The transition will require some reflection. At the launch of Astrobotic, which would take human ashes to the lunar surface, representatives of the Navajo nation, a North American people, expressed opposition, as they consider the Moon sacred in their beliefs. But is it the Moon itself or the image of the Moon, admired by countless generations around the world?

It is obvious that it will be necessary to conduct these new missions with some respect, and it may be important to impose rules stating that any lunar ventures cannot change the appearance of the satellite as seen with the naked eye from Earth – preserving the sacred aspect of traditional cultures. But it is inevitable at this point that the lunar soil will be seen as a new continent to be explored, similar to what happened in Antarctica in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This column is published on Mondays in print, in Folha Corrida.

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