NASA wants to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by the year 2024, which it plans on doing through the Artemis lunar exploration program. ARTEMIS stands for Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of Moon’s Interaction with the Sun. The mission was named Artemis after the Greek mythological goddess of the Moon and twin sister to Apollo, the namesake of the program that sent 12 American astronauts to the Moon between 1969 and 1972.
Objective: The main objective is to measure what happens when the Sun’s radiation hits our rocky moon, where there is no magnetic field to protect it. The mission: For the Artemis program, NASA’s new rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) will send astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft a quarter of a million miles away from Earth to the lunar orbit.
Once astronauts dock Orion at the Gateway — which is a small spaceship in orbit around the moon — the astronauts will be able to live and work around the Moon, and from the spaceship, astronauts will take expeditions to the surface of the Moon.