Why is NASA Returning To The Dark Side? | Unveiled

Why Is NASA Returning To The Dark Side?

Humanity first stepped foot on the moon in 1969 for a truly defining moment in history. But, fast forward more than fifty years, and the perhaps surprising fact is that the moon still remains something of an enigma to us. The last crewed mission there was in December 1972, just three years after Apollo 11. We’ve overwhelmingly favored sending probes and rovers in the time since… but, even then, there are some parts of the lunar world that have remained shrouded in mystery. Until now.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; Why is NASA returning to the dark side of the moon?

Day and night. Sun and moon. These two ever presents have never been too far away from our collective thinking as a species. But, seeing as the sun’s out during the day and the moon at night, it’s the moon that has more often come to be associated with darker phenomena. With mystery and intrigue and a greater sense of the unknown. The ancient Greeks, for example, thought that the dead lived on the moon. In more recent times, science has somewhat taken over our study, but that doesn’t mean the interest has gone away. And what’s perhaps most interesting of all about that glowing orb in the night sky is that we only ever see one side of it. Because the moon is tidally locked, the same side always faces our planet, meaning that for hundreds of thousands of years, forever in fact… no one stood on Earth has ever laid eyes on the other side. The far side of the moon, or what’s popularly known as the “dark side”.

The far side was first photographed by the Soviet Space Program in 1959, but the first time anyone witnessed it in person was in 1968, and it was a big deal. As astronaut Jim Lovell described his experience, while on board NASA’s Apollo 8 mission, “I was observing alive that part of the moon that had been hidden from man for millions of years”. In general, the moon was in the spotlight during the Cold War because both the Soviet Union and the United States felt that they needed to demonstrate their technological capabilities by reaching it. However, the far side of the moon was never really targeted with quite as much gusto as the near side was. And when, in the early ‘70s, the funding for moon missions began to dry up, even if NASA had wanted to go to the far side in particular, it found that it couldn’t justify or afford to do so.

To date, NASA has then never staged a successful mission, crewed or uncrewed, to land specifically on the far side of the moon… mainly because it’s expensive, challenging, and there just hasn’t been the urgency. However, recent global events have brought about something like another space race, with many different forces now interested in setting up long-term lunar bases on the surface of the moon. In fact, while the original space race in the mid-twentieth century was primarily contested between just two countries, now at least seven countries are vying for their own piece of the moon - with the agencies of Japan, South Korea, Russia, China, India, the UAE, and the US - plus the European Space Agency (ESA) - all showing promise. And, arguably, it’s for this reason most of all that NASA is boldly going where it hasn’t before, with a brand new mission on the horizon.

With details announced in 2022, this latest mission will aim for the far side, where NASA hopes to remotely pilot a lander to deliver supplies and conduct experiments. The machine at the center of the mission is the Draper SERIES-2 lunar lander, and it’s expected to touch down on lunar soil sometime in 2025 - a relatively short projection in comparison to some other target dates. The Draper SERIES-2 will actually be part of a wider NASA initiative, though… the increasingly high-profile Artemis Program, which has the explicit goal of establishing a long term human presence on the moon.

The Draper spacecraft is planned to land in an area on the far side called Schrodinger’s Basin, out of which it will employ a variety of experimental equipment that it’ll carry to perform important scientific tests. Schrodinger’s Basin was specifically chosen by NASA because 1) it’s a very young impact basin that has recently formed, compared to others, and 2) the crater that’s been created here features lots of deep crust that has been brought to the surface, which means that scientists will effectively be able to study deeper and older geological samples. What’s more, there’s also evidence of past volcanism within the basin, making it an ideal location to study the moon’s thermal and tectonic activity, too. The Draper, then, will have much to occupy itself with.

Traveling to the far side of the moon is, naturally, more expensive than traveling to the near side, and generally a more difficult task… but there are rich rewards to be had. Because not only is this land that’s almost totally unspoiled by past missions and almost totally unseen by human eye, but it’s also a part of the moon - a big part - that hasn’t been affected by Earth’s electromagnetic field. There’s no other place quite like it within the Earth-moon system. Among the cutting edge equipment that’s set to be delivered to the far side, then, via Draper, is the Farside Seismic Suite (or FSS)... which will allow scientists to study moon tectonics, and also to learn more about the frequency of meteorites that rain down on its surface. Another essential piece of equipment carried by Draper is the Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite (or LITMS). This will include, among other things, a pneumatic drill to dig into the lunar crust - again to discover more about what’s beneath the surface, this time with a greater emphasis on heat flow and the electrical conductivity of lunar material. And, finally, there’s the Lunar Surface ElectroMagnetics Experiment (or LuSEE) which will investigate the moon’s electromagnetic properties, and also some of its weather - including the amount of solar wind and plasma activity that it receives from the sun.

Significantly, though, while this may be NASA’s first dedicated mission to soft land on the far side of the moon, it’s not the first overall. China famously launched a mission to the “other side” in 2019, with the Chang’e 4 lander, which touched down in an area called the Von Kármán crater and studied similar things; like lunar dust, electric fields, and seismology. Chang’e 4 was a massive undertaking, and now stands as something of a bar-setter for this type of exploration. The main problem that it and future far side missions encounter is to do with communications. As radio signals can’t simply reach around the moon, we essentially need checkpoints between there and Earth to control our machines. This means that relay satellites have to be placed all around the moon to redirect transmissions which, unsurprisingly, is expensive. Now though, almost a quarter way through the twenty-first century, and the growing consensus is that it’ll be worth it. Worth it to explore a new land, and to take another, dramatic step further out into space.

The fact that the Draper SERIES-2 lander is but one part of the broader Artemis Program is important. With the launch of Artemis 1 in the late summer of 2022, NASA is finally making a concerted effort to stage their grand return. For so long, the moon has hung in the sky as “somewhere we went to once” without any real suggestion that we’d be going there again anytime soon. But that’s all changing, and with this particular arm of the mission we’re spreading out onto the hallowed half of the moon that we still know so little about. And all with the intention of understanding our environment better than ever before, if Artemis does come through on its main promise; to send humans back to the moon, and this time to stay there.

What’s your verdict on the plans for the Draper lander? Do you expect it to find anything unexpected as it ventures to the far side? And how do you hope that this mission will help in the future for human space travel? Overall, this could become a seriously far-reaching experiment, undertaken in order for us to learn more about the moon in a general sense… to get to grips with its makeup, thermal activity, the frequency of moonquakes, and so on. But it’s also just a really exciting, off-Earth adventure. A chance to explore beyond our own planet. The side of the moon that has remained invisible to us throughout the whole of history is finally going to be revealed. And that’s why NASA is returning to the dark side.