With Artemis, the difficult and costly return of the Americans to the Moon

Fifty-six years after Neil Armstrong's (1930-2012) historic first steps on the Moon, NASA is preparing to return to our natural satellite with the Artemis program . This is, in any case, what Donald Trump aimed for during his first presidential term, by signing, on December 11, 2017, the "Space Policy Directive 1", which officially mandated the American space agency to return to the Moon in the medium term. The Republican wanted, at the time, to relaunch the manned space program after the Obama years marked by the abandonment of the Constellation project, the retirement of the space shuttle and the dependence on Russian Soyuz to reach the International Space Station.

Named in a nod to the lunar epic of the 1960s (the Greek goddess Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo), Artemis is not expected to be content, like its illustrious predecessor, with planting a flag and collecting a few lunar rocks (what the Americans called the "flag and footprint" ). The objective this time is to establish itself permanently on our old gray companion. Surface missions will be longer, spacewalks more numerous, and scientific objectives more ambitious.

These were published in September 2022 in a reference document, with the idea of ​​better understanding the history of the Solar System, the geology of its planetary bodies and their formations, through the study of lunar seismology, for example. "The Apollo seismometers detected more than 10,000 moonquakes. But these insufficiently sensitive recordings only gave us a fuzzy image of the Moon's interior," explains Philippe Lognonné, geophysicist and planetary scientist at the Institut de physique du globe de Paris (IPGP).

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