The Next Stop - MOON

The only thing that makes the dark sky look beautiful amidst the countless stars is the Moon! From gazing it through our windows till setting foot on it, we humans have achieved incredibly bigger in making the dreams coming to reality. On 24th July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed on Moon. After that, we have never made regular visits to Moon for the past 40 years, except sending spacecraft for observations. Despite such a long gap created for the next human missions on Moon, some upcoming promising missions like Artemis are aiming not only to land on the moon, but also to build colonies and start living there. It is of course challenging to live on Moon but it isn’t impossible. After we found lunar water near the poles, hopes of dwelling on the Moon became stronger, thanks to the Chandrayan1 mission.

However, apart from fantasy, the question of why do we have to go to the Moon is still arising in young minds. In the current scenario, the way we are treating our Earth, it is uncertain to settle the life on Earth for our future generations. Hence it is of course the Next Stop-Moon needed. On one side living on Moon has many advantages over Earth. Yes! The moon has almost 10 times lesser gravity than that on Earth. This means that there could be a possibility of direct satellite launches from Moon to Space without building expensive rockets. Rockets are mainly needed to escape the stronger gravitational pull of Earth. So, we can forget to build rockets if we are planning to launch from Moon. This has made the life of scientists easy. Not just that, the dark craters on the moon are very much beneficial for astronomers to observe the night sky from Moon. The presence of an atmosphere on Earth disturbs the night sky observations for instance: the stars. When we observe the stars, it appears to be twinkling. The reason behind twinkling is as the light from a star hits through our atmosphere, it bounces and knocks through the different layers, bending the light before we see it. The bending of the light changes because of the moving hot and cold layers of air. Since Moon has no atmosphere, this phenomenon of twinkling will not be witnessed and therefore doesn’t misguides the astronomers for their scientific studies. The last question, what do we do for survival? Well, there could be a farm near the poles where we could get access to water. 8 hours of sunlight per day is sufficient for plants to grow. Therefore, problem solved! But, we have to take care of temperature and radiation because we have no atmosphere on Moon to protect from extreme conditions of these. Moreover, we have to even think of insect’s pollination. All these have to be provided artificially.

Thanks to nature and all the creatures we have on Earth that provide us everything for free but sometimes we fail to recognize their importance. So, before we are too late, let us value each and everything we see around us. Because even an insect plays a vital role for our survival on Moon!

Ashwini B.R
Co-Founder Givemefive.ai,
MS in Aerospace Engineering, FHWN, Austria, Researcher-TU, Graz, Austria