Why is Nasa’s latest Moon mission named Artemis?

Ancient Greek goddess associated with nature and hunting as well as female independence

The North American Space Agency (Nasa) has rescheduled the maiden rocket launch of its latest mission to place human beings on the surface of the Moon, the Artemis programme.

Blast-off for the unmanned Artemis I was supposed to take place on Monday 29 August from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral but had to be scrubbed at the last minute due to technical problems on the launchpad.

Artemis I is intended as a test of Nasa’s new Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft it carries, which, if all goes to plan at the second time of asking, will orbit the Moon on a 42-day monitoring flight before returning to Earth.

If successful, Artemis I will lead to the launch of Artemis II in 2024, a crewed lunar flyby mission, and then Artemis III in 2025, when Nasa astronauts will actually land on the lunar surface.

The project is intended to involve more women in the revived US space programme, with female engineers accounting for 30 per cent of the crew involved in Artemis I’s design and construction and its ship carrying two mannequins in order to test the impact of radiation on women’s bodies with a view to improving safety for the female astronauts of tomorrow.

The hope is that Artemis III will carry the first woman and the first person of colour to the surface of the moon in three years’ time.

To reflect the feminist aspirations of the mission, Nasa named the undertaking Artemis after the Ancient Greek goddess of that name, the daughter of Zeus and Leto and twin sister of Apollo, god of the sun.

The Greeks associated the Olympian deity with the moon, with nature, with hunting and with both chastity and childbirth and worshipped her from at least the beginning of the first millennium BC.

She is referred to by the poet Homer as “The Mistress of Animals” or “She of the Wild”, was often represented by the bow and arrow or by deer and known to the Romans as Diana.

One of the most celebrated myths involving Artemis concerns the hunter Achteon, who spied upon her while she bathed naked in a secluded pool, angering the goddess and prompting her to turn him into a stag, whereupon he was torn apart and devoured by his own hounds.

The Artemis I unmanned lunar rocket sits on the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida (AFP/Getty)

Siproites, a boy who likewise witnessed her without robes, was meanwhile more mercifully turned into a girl.

Elsewhere, she is said to have behaved vengefully towards her own priestesses who lost their virginity, turning one, Callisto, into a bear after she was impregnated by Zeus, Artemis’s own father, and gave birth to a son, Arcas.

Before she could kill the mother and son, Zeus intervened and delivered them to the heavens, where they shine on as the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

Artemis’s quick temper was used by the Greeks to explain the hostility so commonly demonstrated by the natural world towards humanity.