Actually, it’s a NASA project ‘Artemis’ informally called Dead Spacecraft Walking. Two repurposed 2007 near-Earth solar wind sats (THEMIS P1 & P2) that were eventually spending probably-deadly amounts of time in Earth’s shadow, where their solar panels generated nothing, got the OK to use their onboard fuel to transit to the Moon’s L1 & L2 for 6 months, and then in Mar ’11 will switch to highly eccentric Lunar orbits for several years.
“ARTEMIS is going to give us a fundamental new understanding of the solar wind,” predicts David Sibeck, ARTEMIS project scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “And that’s just for starters.”
ARTEMIS will also explore the Moon’s plasma wake—a turbulent cavity carved out of the solar wind by the Moon itself, akin to the wake just behind a speedboat. Sibeck says “this is a giant natural laboratory filled with a whole zoo of plasma waves waiting to be discovered and studied.”
Another target of the ARTEMIS mission is Earth’s magnetotail. Like a wind sock at a breezy airport, Earth’s magnetic field is elongated by the action of the solar wind, forming a tail that stretches to the orbit of the Moon and beyond. Once a month around the time of the full Moon, the ARTEMIS probes will follow the Moon through the magnetotail for in situ observations.
“We are particularly hoping to catch some magnetic reconnection events,” says Sibeck. “These are explosions in Earth’s magnetotail that mimic solar flares–albeit on a much smaller scale.” ARTEMIS might even see giant ‘plasmoids’ accelerated by the explosions hitting the Moon during magnetic storms.
These far-out explorations may have down-to-Earth applications. Plasma waves and reconnection events pop up on Earth, e.g., in experimental fusion chambers. Fundamental discoveries by ARTEMIS could help advance research in the area of clean renewable energy.
After six months at the Lagrange points, ARTEMIS will move in closer to the Moon—at first only 100 km from the surface and eventually even less than that. From point-blank range, the spacecraft will look to see what the solar wind does to a rocky world when there’s no magnetic field to protect it.
“Earth is protected from solar wind by the planetary magnetic field,” explains Angelopolous. “The Moon, on the other hand, is utterly exposed. It has no global magnetism.”
Mission Page
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