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Update: NASA announced Feb. 3 that it is aiming to launch the Artemis II mission in March 2026.

This week, four U.S. astronauts are slated to begin their history-making journey to the moon and back. The astronauts, the crew of NASA’s , will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as early as Friday, Feb. 6. From there, they’ll fly on the Orion spacecraft to the moon, circle it from high above, then return to Earth.

Artemis II marks the first time that humans will leave the safety of Earth’s orbit since the Apollo 17 mission of 1972. It’s a precursor to Artemis III, which plans to land humans on the lunar surface once more.

Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the (LASP) at CU Boulder, has spent years exploring the moon’s mysteries. He’s investigated, for example, whether the cold, dark craters that dot the lunar surface might harbor stores of ice—which astronauts could mine for drinking water or to make rocket fuel, splitting apart the molecules within to create hydrogen gas.

CU Boulder Today spoke with the lunar researcher about the biggest unanswered questions about the moon, and what it can tell us about humanity’s place in the solar system.

“I'm really interested in the terra incognita of the moon, the places that are so dark and inaccessible that they're very difficult to explore,” said Hayne, an associate professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at CU Boulder.

Why is it important for humans to go back to the moon?

The moon records what's going on in our space environment throughout its history. Unlike Earth, which has experienced weather and erosion that has removed the history of asteroid and comet impacts, the moon preserves all that history over billions of years.

The moon, in a way, is the history book of the solar system.

Paul Hayne

Photo of the Orion spacecraft during NASA's Artemis I mission in 2022, which traveled to the moon and back without astronauts aboard. (Credit: NASA)

How will Artemis be different than the Apollo missions?

Artemis is an opportunity to go to one of the least explored places on the moon, near the moon's South Pole where there are deep, dark shadows inside craters that have never seen sunlight—at least not in the last several billion years.

Because of those dark shadows, the craters are extremely cold. Those permanently shadowed regions are the solar system's garbage collector. Anything that gets collected there doesn't go anywhere for billions of years. This is a treasure trove, scientifically, of things like water and carbon that that we can go and access.

Humans have been studying the moon for a long time. Is there still a lot we don’t know about it?

One of the big-picture science questions we want to answer through the Artemis program is: How did the moon form? This gets at the heart of some of the questions we have about the whole solar system: How did Earth form? How did the planets form?

We think that the moon formed through a giant impact—a Mars-sized protoplanet that collided with Earth very early in its history. It may have stripped off a huge chunk of Earth's interior, and then that material coalesced into what became the moon.

There are some big questions about that history that we need samples from different parts of the moon to answer.

How does your own research connect to Artemis?

A key aspect of the Artemis program is the synergy between science and exploration. NASA is not only sending astronauts through the Artemis II, III and IV missions and beyond, but it’s also sending in the form of landers and rovers carrying scientific experiments.

The scientific experiments that I'm involved with include things like searching for ice at the poles of the moon. We have an infrared camera developed here in Boulder, Colorado, that will be deployed near the moon's South Pole. It's called the , or L-CIRiS. This is a heat-sensing camera that will look for the coldest places where we might identify the conditions for ice to exist.

How is this research critical for humans actually staying on the moon?

The moon, without an atmosphere, has extreme temperature variations—from higher than boiling temperatures in the sunlight to just 15 or 20 degrees above absolute zero in the deep, dark shadows. These are extreme temperature ranges that anything on the surface, including astronauts, will have to contend with. We’re studying the thermal environments by using instruments like L-CIRiS.

Why does space exploration inspire you?

It really takes the combined efforts of our whole society to do these kinds of things. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, ‘We choose to go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's hard.’

Doing so demonstrates that we do have the ability as a society to do things that are challenging—not just for the astronauts, but also for all the people, supporting them in this kind of grand project. I think that shows that we can do other hard things as a society.