The South African National Space Agency (Sansa) has highlighted that it is providing tracking support for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa’s) Artemis I mission. Artemis I is an uncrewed test flight for Nasa’s latest crewed spacecraft programme, Artemis, which will return humans, including the first woman and the first person of colour, to the Moon. Each Artemis mission is composed of the US-built Orion capsule, which will carry the crew, and the European Service Module, provided by the European Space Agency, which provides the propulsion, power, water and oxygen for the spacecraft.

“Our preparations for this historic launch involved qualification and testing of critical systems, analyses of infrastructure reliability, and redundancy simulations,” reported Sansa acting commercial services executive Tiaan Strydom. “We wanted to leave no room for error.”

Sansa’s support is being provided by its Space Operations division, at its ground station complex at Hartebeesthoek, west of Pretoria. However, the support is not being provided directly to Nasa, but is a service that has been contracted by the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC), which in turn is supporting US technology company Peraton, which operates and maintains Nasa’s Near Space Network and Deep Space Network communications systems.

"The Orion tracking support for Artemis I through SSC is a 360-degree moment for Sansa,” affirmed Strydom. “Our involvement in Nasa missions dates back to tracking services provided to the first successful human Moon landing mission in 1969. This support was provided from [what is now] the radio astronomy observatory station [originally] established by Nasa [as a tracking station] in Hartebeesthoek.”

Earlier this month, it was announced that Sansa will play a crucial and long-term supporting role in the Artemis programme, because it will host one of three Nasa Lunar Exploration Ground Sites (LEGS) communication antennas. This network of LEGS antennas will ensure that Artemis mission control will remain in constant contact with Artemis missions in space and on the Moon, up to a range of two-million kilometres (for missions far beyond the Moon). The South African LEGS antenna will be located at a new Sansa facility, to be established at Matjiesfontein, in the Western Cape province, some 240 km north-east of Cape Town.

Artemis I is scheduled to make its final lunar orbital insertion burn (engine firing) at 23h30 South African time, on Friday. This will place it in a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. Distant means that the spacecraft will go far beyond the Moon – at its highest point, its orbit will be some 64 374 km from the lunar surface. Retrograde means that Artemis will orbit the Moon in the opposite direction of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. This type of orbit has been chosen because it is very stable and so will minimise fuel expenditure.