Nasa lunar mission to be monitored from Bermuda – Royal Gazette | Bermuda

Astronauts embarking on a mission to the moon next Wednesday will be monitored by Bermuda’s tracking station on Cooper’s Island.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Artemis II test flight is set to lift off with four crew members on board at around 6.24pm from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
The Artemis II test flight will be Nasa’s first mission with crew aboard the Orion spacecraft mounted on a space launch system rocket.
A spokeswoman for the US Consulate said the ten-day trip around the moon would be monitored from the island, highlighting Bermuda’s “significant role in space exploration”.
Kimille Trott, a Bermudian engineer who is part of the Artemis programme, will be monitoring the mission launch from the console at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama.
Ms Trott has been working with a team of engineers for a key part of the space launch rocket.
The mission will demonstrate a broad range of capabilities needed on deep space missions, Nasa said on its website.
The Artemis II mission builds on the success of Nasa’s Artemis I mission in 2022 which had no crew aboard.
Nasa said the four astronauts would look at the moon from a unique perspective during the mission.
They will orbit at a much higher altitude — between 4,000 and 6,000 miles from the moon’s surface — than the Apollo missions, which took place between 1968 and 1972.
“As a result, the astronauts will see the entire disk of the moon, including areas near the north and south poles,” Nasa said.
At closest approach, the moon will appear to the Artemis II crew to be about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length.
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