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To The Moon! What Challenges Does NASA’s 2024 Lunar Mission Face?

NASA has big plans for returning American astronauts to the moon. However, in our reviews of the agency’s efforts, we’ve discovered a number of challenges and obstacles that NASA must address in order to meet its planned timeline for these missions.

Today’s WatchBlog post explores.

NASA’s moon landing

NASA was already working to return astronauts to the moon by 2028 when, 2 years ago, the White House directed NASA to speed up plans to 2024 instead.

The planned 2024 mission, known as Artemis III, will be the first human lunar landing in over 50 years and is the start of larger plans for NASA. Later Artemis missions will establish a longer-term lunar presence. That could include establishing a lunar base camp for stays of 1 to 2 months on the moon’s surface, and developing rovers to help astronauts conduct lunar research.

But recently, we found that a moon landing in 2024 would be difficult to achieve.

Major NASA Projects and programs supporting the lunar missions

Challenges with the test flights

Before NASA can return to the moon, it must complete two test flights: an uncrewed flight currently planned for later this year, and a flight with crew planned for 2023. The test flights will demonstrate that the Space Launch System launch vehicle, Orion crew capsule, and associated ground systems have the initial capabilities needed for future Artemis missions.

NASA has made some recent progress towards these flights, including completing the “Green Run” series of tests of the Space Launch System’s core stage.

NASA launch pad art

We’ve been tracking these programs’ progress and challenges for years, including the latest set of delays in a report last December.

After the programs are integrated, Artemis I and II must successfully occur—and any issues discovered during them must be resolved—before NASA can have confidence in the abilities needed to return astronauts to the lunar surface.

Getting boots on the moon

Because Artemis III’s launch was sped up by 4 years, NASA is counting on being able to develop its components really quickly.

For example, NASA is developing a human lander to carry the astronauts on the final portion of their journey to the lunar surface. NASA’s plans include 64 months to develop the lander—about 2 years faster than other NASA projects have taken on average. And a lander is inherently more complex than these other projects because it will carry crew. 

Another challenge is that Artemis III depends on the completion of many different, interdependent projects, some of which are early in development. These include:

The lander,

Updated spacesuits,

And potentially Gateway, a platform that’ll serve as a sort of pit stop in orbit around the moon where astronauts can fuel up on power, water, and other supplies. Establishing Gateway is significant for NASA’s longer-term lunar exploration goals, but NASA has not yet determined whether it’ll use Gateway in the 2024 mission.

A 2024 lunar landing will require extensive coordination across these projects to ensure their systems will work together safely and seamlessly. These separate projects have a long way to go before they’ll be ready for liftoff, including having to develop some new technologies. In addition to the known challenges, the aggressive schedule also doesn’t leave much room for any unexpected problems.

Want to learn more about our work on NASA’s upcoming missions? Check out our 2021 NASA Quick Look, featuring 2-page assessments of NASA’s lunar and other major projects. And listen in on our podcast about NASA’s lunar mission with GAO’s Bill Russell, an expert on NASA programs.

https://www.gao.gov/blog/moon-what-challenges-does-nasas-2024-lunar-mission-face

LUNA-25, THE RELAY OF THE SOVIET LUNAR PROGRAM

Don't let its name fool you. Luna-25 is Russia's first attempt to reach the surface of the Moon, as its predecessor, Luna-24, was the last of 3 successful missions carried out by the Soviet Union to collect samples from our satellite. Launched in 1976, this last time the mission brought 170 grams of lunar soil to Earth.

According to the Russian Space Corporation -Roscosmos- after postponing its launch scheduled for July 13, 2023, the Luna-25 spacecraft is currently going through the final cycle of its ground tests.

Its takeoff is scheduled for the month of August, and with it will depart the ambitions of Luna-25 becoming the first spacecraft in modern Russian history to land on the surface of the Earth's natural satellite. The mission will be launched on a Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with the aim of landing in the Boguslawsky crater area and carrying out various studies of the lunar South Pole

https://www.nationalgeographic.com.es/ciencia/objetivo-luna-estas-son-x-misiones-que-se-dirigen-a-nuestro-satelite-2023_20378

Ordinary computers can beat Google’s quantum computer after all

If the quantum computing era dawned 3 years ago, its rising sun may have ducked behind a cloud. In 2019, Google researchers claimed they had passed a milestone known as quantum supremacy when their quantum computer Sycamore performed in 200 seconds an abstruse calculation they said would tie up a supercomputer for 10,000 years. Now, scientists in China have done the computation in a few hours with ordinary processors. A supercomputer, they say, could beat Sycamore outright.

“I think they’re right that if they had access to a big enough supercomputer, they could have simulated the … task in a matter of seconds,” says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin. The advance takes a bit of the shine off Google’s claim, says Greg Kuperberg, a mathematician at the University of California, Davis. “Getting to 300 feet from the summit is less exciting than getting to the summit.”

Still, the promise of quantum computing remains undimmed, Kuperberg and others say. And Sergio Boixo, principal scientist for Google Quantum AI, said in an email the Google team knew its edge might not hold for very long. “In our 2019 paper, we said that classical algorithms would improve,” he said. But, “we don’t think this classical approach can keep up with quantum circuits in 2022 and beyond.”

The “problem” Sycamore solved was designed to be hard for a conventional computer but as easy as possible for a quantum computer, which manipulates qubits that can be set to 0, 1, or—thanks to quantum mechanics—any combination of 0 and 1 at the same time. Together, Sycamore’s 53 qubits, tiny resonating electrical circuits made of superconducting metal, can encode any number from 0 to 253 (roughly 9 quadrillion)—or even all of them at once.

Starting with all the qubits set to 0, Google researchers applied to single qubits and pairs a random but fixed set of logical operations, or gates, over 20 cycles, then read out the qubits. Crudely speaking, quantum waves representing all possible outputs sloshed among the qubits, and the gates created interference that reinforced some outputs and canceled others. So some should have appeared with greater probability than others. Over millions of trials, a spiky output pattern emerged.

https://www.science.org/content/article/ordinary-computers-can-beat-google-s-quantum-computer-after-all