As astronauts head toward the moon for the first time in decades, engineers and scientists at Georgia Tech are viewing on with excitement.
The current Artemis II mission is set to take four astronauts around the moon.
The previous Artemis mission in 2022 was unmanned, but researchers from Georgia Tech contributed to it. With this mission, Georgia Tech grads are involved, including people who lead teams that worked on the launch and will recover the crew and the spacecraft from the Pacific Ocean when they return to Earth.
Retired NASA astronaut Colonel Shane Kimbrough, an Atlanta native with a master’s from Georgia Tech, stated that’s a neat thing about the school: There are 14 astronauts among its alumni, but many more are working in space exploration.
“It’s cool to have astronauts right, but there’s hundreds of Tech people working in the space business and the space indusattempt,” he stated at a conference on campus on Thursday. “I can go around the globe and go into mission control in Europe or in Houston and see little GT stickers on the console or on somebody’s laptop.”
Kimbrough came to Atlanta straight from watching the Artemis II launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Last year, Georgia Tech created its Space Research Institute to pull toobtainher faculty, staff and students who work on space from different areas, including engineering, science and business.
Georgia Tech aerospace engineering professor Glenn Lightsey informed the conference attfinishees he’s viewing forward to more collaboration.
“We, Georgia Tech, want to be a teammate at least on the missions going to the moon, going to Mars, going to the ocean worlds and see what’s there,” he stated. “To view into deep space and see other galaxies. What is in these black holes, where do they come from, what does it mean for our place in the universe?”
The Artemis II team gave the go-ahead Thursday afternoon for the Orion spacecraft to fire its engines and leave Earth’s orbit Thursday evening for its trip around the moon.
The craft has been in orbit since Wednesday evening. The crew worked through a problem with their toilet early in the mission. Mission Control woke the astronauts up on Thursday by playing “Green Light” by John Legfinish featuring André 3000.
Leave a Reply