Original subtitles

(compelling music)

- [Narrator] Artemis, the sister of Apollo,

she will soon be returning humans to the moon.

The decades of development are nearly complete.

New hardware, new ways of making the journey,

and new goals have been set.

This time, the United States will not be going it alone.

This time it's an international effort.

(compelling music)

(exciting music)

The first major test will be Artemis I,

an uncrewed journey to the moon and beyond,

a final hardware shakedown for manned flights.

(exciting music)

- Nowadays, astronauts, engineers,

and scientists are very excited to go to the moon

because it's pure exploration.

It's discovering terra incognita

We would go to regions that were never been well explored

by a human neither robotically nor in person.

The moon is really our eighth continent,

and it's there to be discovered.

Last time humans have been there was in the '60s and '70s,

and they covered, well, 12 people covered six landing sites,

and imagine that in an area that's so huge.

It really doesn't give us a lot of knowledge

about the moon itself.

- [Narrator] This lunar spacecraft comprises ESA's ESM,

the NASA's Orion crew capsule.

It'll be used for an uncrewed certification flight,

performing a six day orbit around the moon.

- We return to the moon for various reasons,

different technologies,

and it is a big achievement, I believe.

- All over in Europe, we have companies

in 10 countries helping to put this ESM together,

which is quite significant, and actually,

there are hundreds and thousands of people working

within Airbus, but within in our partner companies

to make this endeavor a successful mission.

(birds chirping) (bright music)

- [Narrator] Monitoring of the performance

of the ESA segment will be conducted here

at ESTEC in the Netherlands.

- These folks here are specifically taking care

of the European service module

which provides the human capsule part of that

with all its power and life support.

So this team here is really taking care of the crew

that'll be going to the moon and beyond.

(bright music)

- So there are mainly two type of support

that's basically two type of situation.

Nominal situation, everything goes fine.

Here, we are actively supporting,

actively monitoring the spacecraft, looking at the trend

of the parameters to try to predict as much as we can.

If something is, I mean, if a failure is building up,

or if everything is nominal,

and again, anticipation is the key,

meaning that you have to know your mission,

and you know you have to know what's coming up,

what's coming next for (indistinct).

And then things you cannot predict,

and that's why we are training with failures

in the simulations.

These are failures, and to failures, how we react,

how we talk on the voice loops,

how we communicate throughout the position

between the value subsystems to quickly identify

what is the failures to investigate,

to understand the root cause,

and also any likely impact onto the other subsystems,

on the system, and also on the mission.

- I mean, it's human space flight,

and you're always gonna have anomalies.

We don't say a problem.

A problem is indicative of something you don't know that,

but anomalies come from engineering.

You can find them, solve them, and continue on.

And that's what the teams have been working through recently

through the dress rehearsals.

There was four dress rehearsals

to make sure everything's absolutely right.

Today's simulation is what they call

an inspection simulation, so the idea is during a launch,

they will do a systematic inspection.

It's of the entire spacecraft.

The European service module sits

on top of the NASA SLS rocket.

So basically on a pre-launch check,

they'll just really systematically look at every piece

of those vehicles trying to identify any potential anomalies

or such before they fly.

(bright music)

(rocket roaring)

- The surface of the moon has about the same area as Africa.

And we only visited the moon six times

in the 1960s and 1970s, so if you think about landing

in six different spots in Africa,

you quickly realize that there's so much more left to learn

and understand about how the moon formed,

and how it's evolved over the last four

and a half billion years.

(compelling music)

(spacecraft whooshing)

- [Narrator] Before NASA's Artemis astronauts go

to the moon, a small spacecraft called

CAPSTONE is leading the way.

(compelling music)

This small spacecraft will test a unique lunar orbit

that has never been flown before.

This orbit will be home for NASA's Gateway elements.

(dramatic music)

- Behind me is a mockup of the habitat

and logistics outpost, or as we call it, the HALO module.

The HALO module and the power

and propulsion element will be delivered

to lunar orbit to make up

the first components of NASA's Gateway.

The Gateway is going to be crew tended,

where crews will visit the Gateway

for a period of a few weeks or a few months.

HALO and the PPE are just the first components

of the Gateway, with plenty of room for future growth.

Northrop Grumman has been delivering cargo

to the International Space Station

using the Cygnus spacecraft since 2013.

That's 15 missions and counting.

We are now using that Cygnus experience

and our lessons learned in the design of the HALO module.

(ethereal music)

- [Narrator] With the power and HALO modules in place,

the Gateway will be built up over several launches.

The IHAB module will be delivered

by the first manned Orion mission.

A logistics module

with the Canadian robotic arm will be next,

the lunar landing system.

Then Artemis III will deliver the refueling infrastructure

and telecommunications module before proceeding

onto a landing at the lunar southern pole.

(ethereal music)

Before any descent attempt, a crucial component

for Artemis is location of a landing site.

(ethereal music)

Unlike the Apollo missions that landed

along the relatively flat equatorial regions,

Artemis will be landing at the southern pole of the moon,

a far more challenging landing scenario.

(ethereal music)

Six landing regions have been identified close

to the permanently shadow regions where water may be found.

However, further exploration of these sites is required

to pinpoint the most ideal landing location.

This will require the services of robots.

NASA is sending VIPER to scout the terrain.

(vehicle humming)

- [Spokesperson] VIPER is a rover of many firsts.

The first NASA rover to map water resources,

and it's the first rover to wear a headlight.

(vehicle humming) (ethereal music)

- [Narrator] VIPER will be one of many robots descending

on the lunar pole in search of water.

(ethereal music)

Testing these robots is well underway

in terrain most lunar-like.

(ethereal music)

- Traditionally, rovers are operated from the Earth.

With the lunar Gateway being put in place around the moon,

there's the possibility of controlling them directly

with much smaller time delay, and this opens up

for a new possibilities for things

that you simply cannot do or is much more difficult

to do from the Earth.

So now we're here in Sicily.

We're doing, we are repeating our experiments

on the slopes of Mount Aetna.

The astronaut is not on the National Space Station.

He's controlling from a hotel room here.

We have our European Space Operations Center in Germany

in Darmstadt who are directly overseeing

and running the operations, and in the roleplay,

they are pretending to be on the moon,

and it's very realistic, because the slopes

of Mount Aetna is a wonderful lunar Analog.

It looks exactly like the moon.

There's beautiful craters, there's rocks, it's gray.

So we have the European Space Operations Center able

to really immerse themselves in the roleplay,

feel like they are planning traverses

and exploring regions of interest on the moon,

in close discussion with the scientists

who also get this full immersion,

where they see a real, realistic lunar-like geology,

so they can have a real discussion.

They need to then communicate this

to the European Space Operations Center,

who has to then make decisions

about how they are gonna execute operations,

whether they make use of the astronaut

for direct teleoperation with a short time delay,

or whether they make use of their own tools for planning

longer traverses and not wasting astronaut time on this.

So this is the type of trade-offs and the sort

of things that we want to learn how to do for real

when we go to the moon by playing, essentially,

the scenario playing the game here on Mount Aetna.

The astronaut is doing the same

as he did on the National Space Station in 2019.

So he has a control station which allows him

to fully teleoperate the rover.

What I mean by that is that he can drive it.

He can control the arms with the direct feedback.

So we have a very immersive control station

which allows him to feel a bit like he's on the surface.

The robot is his avatar on the surface,

it's designed so that he can touch things

with the robotic arm and feel what the robotic arm feels.

It's designed so that he can decide

whether he wants to drive with the joystick

or he can plan his traverses and automatically do it.

He can choose whether he want to manually pick up rocks,

whether he can do it automatically,

and we really want to learn from his experience

which of these tools he's using,

which of these tools he's finding useful

in different situations,

and how his interactions are happening

with the science team, how easy it is to communicate,

which samples to pick up, how the interactions are going

with the European Space Operations Center

when they think it's better that he uses his tools to do it,

or when they, when it's better that they do it,

how the handovers are working.

All of these things is what we're trying to to learn here.

(indistinct chatter)

It's a very complex experiment,

because it has a lot of stakeholders, a lot of partners,

because there's a lot of different objectives.

We are trying to validate technologies

that have not really been used extensively in space.

We have this device we used in 2019.

It's the first time something

like this level of complexity has been used

to control robots from the space station.

We have the whole operational scenario,

which involves a lot of parties, this game,

which is we are trying to learn a lot from.

So this complexity makes it a very challenging experiment,

but that way we learn a lot.

- We are here in Mount Aetna in the frame

of the Artemis campaign, and this campaign is organized

by the German Aerospace Center, so there are multiple robots

from the German Aerospace Center.

We are guests, our robot from ISA,

and also other research institutes are actually practicing

with their robots how it is on a real scenario.

So here in Mount Aetna it is very close to what we expect

on the moon in sense of soil conditions

and harsh environment, dusty, rocky slopes, and loose sand.

(device whirring)

Our robot is controlled today by an astronaut.

For this purpose, we invited Thomas Reiter,

and for us it's important that it's an astronaut,

because in these scenarios, we want to practice

what happens in reality.

So there would be an astronaut sitting in the spacecraft

and controlling a robot on the surface of a planet,

and in the past, we have done this with the ISS,

so we had Luca Parmitano in 2019 with Analog I controlling

our robot in the hangar in Falkenberg.

And here of course, we are at Mount Aetna,

moon-like scenario, but it's very difficult to have

an astronaut on the ISS controlling a robot here

on the mountain to have all the logistics

and everything set up at the same time.

But to have a fair comparison,

we indeed have Thomas Reiter in the hotel room

in Catania controlling a robot here

in the realistic scenario.

- Yeah, today was a very special scenario

because we tested the cooperation

between a ground control, people who are sitting

in a control room somewhere on Earth,

and the crew that is orbiting

around the moon in the lunar Gateway,

and this specific cooperation turned out

to be extremely fruitful.

In earlier times, it was always thought

that there is either a purely robotic operation

which is exclusively controlled from control centers

on the Earth, and the crew doing something

in situ, being really on the surface of the moon.

And I think what we learned here is that

this kind of collaboration that you are doing

from ground control on the Earth,

crew that is on board a space station that is orbiting

the moon, and rover that is on the surface can be

extremely efficient, and much more efficient

than actually if either one does it alone.

(rover whirring)

- Well, it's certainly less dangerous to send the rover

to the surface than to send an astronaut.

It's also cheaper.

It's also possible to not take up so much of their time.

You know, astronaut time is extremely valuable,

so you can send a rover to the surface.

You can let the ground team do all their planning,

let the them do all the longer traverses,

and you get the astronaut involved when it's necessary

for maybe the more complex task

or the things where he really direct operation,

direct control of the robot is more helpful.

(rover whirring)

- Our rover is built by the lab,

and it's a demonstration rover.

So we want indeed to figure out what features do we need

in a future space mission.

So of course, if you control a rover, you need

for awareness, video cameras for the simple ones,

but of course, to go somewhere into like a motion platform,

it needs to be fitted for this loose soil underground,

and to manipulate things, for example, pick up rocks

or maybe maintenance of infrastructure,

you need robotic arms.

And so our robot was constructed with this purpose in mind

to have it controlled by an astronaut

with force feedback to perform these kind of tasks.

But of course, we are also looking in the future,

so direct tail operation is good, but of course,

we also want to enhance our system

by more and more autonomous features.

And so there my team developed, for example,

automated rock detection

so that the astronaut doesn't need to grasp rock manually,

but indeed that the machine learning algorithm detects

a rock, controls robot to grasp it automatically,

and this way, we want to step by step increase

the capabilities to automatic driving,

automatic obstacle detection, rock detection to come

actually from a remote operated system

to a more autonomous system.

(rover whirring)

Today we tried to achieve a full control

and full scenario of our robot.

So in the past experiments, we went always step by step,

so we had a force feedback device on the station.

We had a robot in a controlled environment, and indeed,

this is one of the first times we put out robot

in a really harsh environment here on Mount Aetna.

So it's moon-like, we have a complex scenario

with the operation center in the background,

the astronaut with time delay in the control center,

and indeed, a task that has been prepared

by the team in Darmstadt that was not known

to the scientists and to the astronaut beforehand,

so here we really tried to get as close as possible

to real scenarios with surprises in a hard environment,

and if we master this, we are really confident

that these technologies can be developed further

to make it space great to indeed be part

of the next moon mission.

(whimsical music) (device padding)

(spacecraft whooshing) (whimsical music)

In our scenario, which is based on a notional machine

based on the European Large Logistics Lander,

the astronaut in collaboration

with the European Space Operation Center will be collecting

the samples, bringing them back to the lander,

and then they will be brought back to the Gateway

or directly to Earth for analysis by the scientists.

(compelling music)

- [Narrator] Autonomous robotics will be used

not just on the moon, but farther afield.

(compelling music)

Plans are underway

with the Mars sample-return mission.

Landers and launchers are being developed

for this mission that will see an autonomous robot

or even perhaps helicopters that will land on Mars

and pick up the samples collected by the Mars rover.

(rover whirring) (compelling music)

(device hissing) (compelling music)

Once brought back to the lander,

they'll be loaded onto a launcher, returned to orbit,

(rocket roaring)

collected by the orbiting vehicle,

(dramatic music)

and carried back to Earth via a small reentry vehicle

holding the precious cargo.

(dramatic music)

(device crashing)

(device crashing)

(dramatic music)

(spacecraft whooshing)

(bright music)