Meet HALO, the First Module of NASA's Gateway Lunar Space Station
While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were putting the first boot prints in the lunar regolith, Michael Collins was holed up in the CMS, waiting to rendezvous with the away team and return home. It's been over 50 years since then, but when humanity returns to the Moon with the Artemis program, astronauts orbiting in lunar orbit will have somewhere a little nicer to hang their helmets.
The HALO module will serve as the heart of the upcoming Gateway lunar space station, and it's almost ready for showtime.
Like the International Space Station, Gateway will provide a pressurized and livable environment for astronauts to work in space. Unlike the ISS, Gateway will orbit much farther away and provide regular access to the lunar surface. It's a space-based architectural project nearly on par with the interstellar crafts of The Ark (streaming now on Peacock).
The Gateway station will be built in stages, but it begins with HALO and its traveling partner, the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE). Both modules will be joined together into one integrated spacecraft at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and strapped to the top of a Falcon Heavy rocket. Once off Earth, HALO and PPE will take about a year to settle into a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon.
Rather than having a mostly circular orbit like a planet, Gateway will have an oblong orbit like a comet. Most of the time the station and its crew will hang out in deep space, as much as 43,500 miles from the Moon, but once a week it will swing in for its closest approach, just 1,000 miles above the lunar surface. This peculiar orbit marries the benefits of a wide orbit (lower fuel requirements) with the benefits of a low orbit (access to the surface).
Gateway is intended as an orbiting research facility, a staging ground for lunar surface activities, and a stepping stone toward crewed missions to Mars.
Short for Habitation and Logistics Outpost, HALO is the first habitation module for the Gateway station. The module, which was manufactured by Thales Alenia Space in Italy, recently completed the first leg of its journey to the Moon. On April 1, 2025, following a quick flight across the Atlantic and across most of North America, HALO arrived at Northrop Grumman's integration and test facility in Arizona.
The module provides space for astronauts to live, work, do space-based research, and prepare for surface activities on the Moon. It also provides docking ports for visiting spacecraft, resupply missions, and lunar landers.
While in Arizona, the HALO team will install propellant and electrical lines, attach radiators for thermal control, and mount racks to house life support hardware, flight computers, avionics systems, and other crucial spaceflight equipment. Once finished, HALO will also feature an Internal Dosimeter Array (IDA), the Heliophysics Environmental Radiation Measurement Experiment Suite (HERMES) and European Radiation Sensors Array (ERSA) to measure and study the effects of cosmic radiation in a unique lunar environment.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) is being assembled at Maxar Space Systems in California.
The PPE is a vast solar electric plant of the same type used on NASA's asteroid-punching DART mission. Two sprawling solar arrays, each about the size of a football field's endzone, collect sunlight and convert it to electricity. The system generates 60kW of power, enough to keep all of Gateway's subsystems fed, in addition to powering the station's solar eclectic propulsion system. Electricity generated by the PPE is used to ionize xenon gas, then those ionized atoms are fired away from the craft to generate thrust and keep the station in orbit. Onboard batteries provided by JAXA will keep the station in power during eclipse periods when the solar panels won't get enough sunlight.
Both modules will be connected together at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and launched as a single integrated spacecraft no earlier than September 2028, as a part of Artemis IV.
Later missions will integrate additional modules, including the ESA's Lunar I-Hab. Taken together, astronauts will be able to live and work around the Moon for about 30 days, splitting time between orbital operations in deep space and surface operations at the lunar South Pole.
Catch The Ark, .
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
26 minutes ago
- Forbes
Possible Alpha Centauri Exoplanet Likely One Of The First We'll Visit
Today astronomers announced the likely discovery of an exoplanet in the Alpha Centauri system that is almost certain to be among the first beyond our solar system to be visited by humans – or at least passed by human-made robots. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope spotted 'strong evidence' of a roughly Saturn-sized gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri A, one of the trio of stars making up Alpha Centauri, the closest set of stars to Earth beyond our own sun. The findings will be published in a pair of upcoming papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. While the planet orbits in the habitable zone, the extreme environment found on gas giant planets is not thought to host life as we know it. We could still be witnessing the process of science fiction turning into science fact, however. Numerous works of science fiction have been set in the Alpha Centauri system, including the blockbuster Avatar franchise, which is set largely on a moon orbiting a giant planet not unlike the one researchers suspect they've found. Not Officially an Exoplanet Just Yet The possible planet is still technically a planet 'candidate,' but if confirmed it would be the closest to its host star to ever be directly imaged, as well as the first around a star that is very similar to our sun in terms of age and temperature. Directly imaging a star is what it sounds like: directly observing light from the planet using a telescope or other instrument. But this isn't how many exoplanets are discovered. Many distant worlds have been found by observing how they impact the brightness or even the 'wobble' of a star as they orbit. Closer stars are better candidates for direct imaging, which also allows scientists to study the worlds in greater depth. 'With this system being so close to us, any exoplanets found would offer our best opportunity to collect data on planetary systems other than our own. Yet, these are incredibly challenging observations to make, even with the world's most powerful space telescope, because these stars are so bright, close, and move across the sky quickly,' said Charles Beichman from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is also co-first author on the new papers, in a statement. Three planets have been found around the dwarf planet Proxima Centauri, by far the smallest and dimmest of the stellar threesome. The much greater size and brightness of the other two stars have made it difficult to spot planets in their orbits. But by using Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), along with detailed analysis and computer modeling, researchers ruled out other explanations – such as a background galaxy, asteroid or image artifact – for the object seen in observations. 'Webb was designed and optimized to find the most distant galaxies in the universe. The operations team at the Space Telescope Science Institute had to come up with a custom observing sequence just for this target, and their extra effort paid off spectacularly,' Beichman explained. A New Understanding for Exoplanets While not habitable, the lure of such a new planet – not to mention its neighbors around Proxima Centauri and others still waiting to be found – is likely to be irresistible to scientists and even those with a basic curiosity about the cosmos. 'Its very existence in a system of two closely separated stars would challenge our understanding of how planets form, survive, and evolve in chaotic environments,' said CalTech Ph.D. student Aniket Sanghi, a co-author on the papers. At only four light years away, it's at least theoretically possible that some sort of craft could travel there from Earth in under a decade. The closest thing proposed so far is the Breakthrough Starshot mission that would send a small probe to the system using a laser probe, taking about 25 years to reach its target. As for sending actual people to explore the system, the Chrysalis multi-generational ship proposes taking less than 400 years to make the trip, transporting over 1,000 people on a city-sized craft. The very hypothetical concept recently won the Project Hyperion design contest. But first, scientists will check again to make sure the planet candidate does in fact exist. Future observations are planned by the Webb telescope as well as NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, expected to launch in 2027.
CNET
an hour ago
- CNET
The ISS Crew Is Returning to Earth: Here's How to Watch Online
It's time to change crews on the International Space Station. On Friday, you can tune in to NASA's live coverage of the return of Crew-10 on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and more streaming services. Events begin with the hatch closure and undocking on Friday, and the crew return on the following day. The return was delayed a day due to high winds at the splashdown sites off the coast of California. Weather conditions will be continually monitored and the specific splashdown location will be determined closer to the time of the Crew-10 spacecraft undocking. Crew-10 has been at the International Space Station for five months, and is set to return a week after the arrival of the Crew-11 team on the 2nd of August. The returning crew consists of NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichile Ayers, along with JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut, Kirill Peskov. Here's the schedule for live coverage, though it's subject to change. Friday, Aug. 8 3:45 p.m. – Hatch closure coverage begins on NASA+ and Amazon Prime. 4:20 p.m. – Hatch closing 5:45 p.m. – Undocking coverage begins on NASA+ and Amazon Prime. 6:05 p.m. – Undocking After the day one coverage concludes, audio-only discussions will become available, including conversations from Crew-10 and the space station, as the SpaceX Dragon makes its journey back. Crew-11 consists of US astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke and Kimiya Yui, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. They arrived at the ISS Aug. 2 and will stay for about six months. Saturday, Aug. 9 10:15 a.m. – Return coverage begins on NASA+ and Amazon Prime. 10:39 a.m. – Deorbit burn 11:33 a.m. – Splashdown 1 p.m. – Return to Earth media teleconference will stream live on the agency's YouTube channel, with the following participants:
CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
Hubble offers sharp new view of interstellar comet
A new image has revealed the clearest glimpse yet of an interstellar visitor zipping through our solar system. The Hubble Telescope and its Wide Field Camera 3 got an incredible view of the comet named 3I/ATLAS, which came from beyond our solar system, on July 21 when the object was 277 million miles (445 million kilometers) from Earth. In the image, a teardrop-shaped dust cocoon can be seen streaking from the comet's icy nucleus. A comet's nucleus is its solid core, made of ice, dust and rocks. When comets travel near stars such as the sun, heat causes them to release gas and dust, which creates their signature tails. The venerable telescope is just one of many that are being used to track the comet, first discovered on July 1, as it zooms at a blistering 130,000 miles (209,000 kilometers) per hour. Its speed makes 3I/ATLAS the fastest object that originated outside of our solar system to ever be observed traveling through it. New observations, like those made with Hubble, are shedding more light on the comet's size. The small nucleus, which cannot be directly seen, could be as large as 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) in diameter or as small as 1,000 feet (305 meters) across, according to a new paper accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Meanwhile, other space-based telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, along with ground-based observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, could reveal more about the object's chemical composition. The comet is expected to remain visible to ground-based telescopes through September before passing too close to the sun to be spotted until it reappears on the other side of our star in early December. But big questions about 3I/ATLAS remain, some of which may be impossible to answer — including where exactly it came from. 'No one knows where the comet came from. It's like glimpsing a rifle bullet for a thousandth of a second. You can't project that back with any accuracy to figure out where it started on its path,' said lead study author David Jewitt, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a statement. While the comet appears to behave like those that originated in our solar system — as evidenced by that dust plume Hubble captured — the speed of 3I/ATLAS is one indicator that it's a visitor from another solar system in our galaxy. Scientists estimate it has been traveling through interstellar space for billions of years. As objects travel through space, they experience a gravitational slingshot effect from whizzing by stars and stellar nurseries that increases their momentum. So the longer 3I/ATLAS has spent in space, the faster it moves. The comet is only the third known interstellar object to have been observed in our solar system after 'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. '3I in particular is remarkable due to its velocity,' said Matthew Hopkins, a recent doctoral student in the department of physics at the University of Oxford who authored a separate study about the object. 'This velocity is very useful to us in particular as over the last few years me and my coauthors have been building a model that allows us to predict properties of (interstellar objects) such as their age and composition, just from their velocity.' For Hopkins, the discovery of 3I/ATLAS was incredibly fortuitous. The find occurred just five days after he finished his doctoral work, which involved a lot of time spent making predictions about future interstellar object discoveries. In a few months, he'll begin a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where he'll continue to research 3I/ATLAS. During his doctoral studies, Hopkins and his collaborators in New Zealand developed the Ōtautahi–Oxford model, a combination of data from the Milky Way's star population and models of how planetary systems form that could help astronomers determine what interstellar object populations should look like. Now, Hopkins is the lead author of a separate preprint study about 3I/ATLAS. It's difficult to determine the age of interstellar objects, but Hopkins and his colleagues believe 3I/ATLAS has about a 67% chance of being more than 7.6 billion years old — while our sun, solar system and its comets are only 4.5 billion years old, he said. It's pure chance that the interstellar comet crossed into our solar system — but it's not entirely rare, Hopkins said. We just don't see these visitors most of the time. '(Interstellar objects) actually pass through the Solar System all the time, especially the smaller ones which are more numerous: 80 the size of 'Oumuamua (about 656 feet, or 200 meters, across) pass through the orbit of Jupiter every year, they're just too small to detect unless they get very close to the Earth,' Hopkins wrote in an email. However, astronomers are eager to have the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which released its first images this summer, scanning the skies for interstellar the observatory's massive primary mirror spanning 28 feet (8.4 meters) across, it can spot small, faint and distant objects — and it's scanning the entire sky every three nights, allowing the telescope to better catch sight of rapidly moving interstellar objects. Hopkins' coauthors estimate that Rubin could spy anywhere between five and 50 interstellar objects over the next 10 years, and Hopkins is optimistically leaning toward the latter. Discovering more interstellar objects could help astronomers determine how varied or similar they are, especially since the first three have been so different from one another, Hopkins said. 'This latest interstellar tourist is one of a previously undetected population of objects bursting onto the scene that will gradually emerge,' Jewitt said. 'This is now possible because we have powerful sky survey capabilities that we didn't have before. We've crossed a threshold.' Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
