WASHINGTON: NASA announced on Tuesday that eight countries have signed an international agreement called the Artemis Accords that outlines the principles of future exploration of the Moon and beyond.
The treaty paves the way for its founding members — Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, United Arab Emirates, Britain and the United States — to participate in NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return humans to Earth’s nearest neighbor by 2024.
“Artemis will be the broadest and most diverse international human space exploration program in history, and the Artemis Accords are the vehicle that will establish this singular global coalition,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
“With today’s signing, we are uniting with our partners to explore the Moon and are establishing vital principles that will create a safe, peaceful, and prosperous future in space for all of humanity to enjoy.”
While NASA is leading the Artemis program, it has emphasized the need for international partnerships in building up a sustainable presence on the Moon, something the agency views as key ahead of an eventual human mission to Mars.
The agency hopes, for example, to excavate ice from the Moon’s south pole to supply both drinking water and to split the molecules apart to make rocket fuel for the onward journey.
It also plans to establish an orbital space station called Gateway.
NASA said the Artemis Accords reinforce and implement the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and are split broadly into 10 principles.
The signatories commit, for example, to adhering to peaceful exploration in a transparent manner, to create hardware systems that are operable by every member nation, and to registering their space objects.
Other principles include affirming that they will render assistance to each other in case of emergency, make their scientific data public, preserve the heritage of outer space and plan for the safe disposal of space debris.
The announcement came a day after Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said Moscow was unlikely to participate in the Gateway space station, marking the probable end of the type of close cooperation seen for two decades on the International Space Station (ISS).
The Artemis Accords also exclude China, a rising space rival to the United States.
China has an active lunar program with its own international collaborations.
Last month, a Chinese-German team published daily radiation measurements on the lunar surface recorded by the Chang’E 4 lander in 2019.
They concluded that the level of radiation limited astronauts to two or three months on the Moon — vital information that the US Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s had not gathered.
UAE among eight countries in NASA ‘Artemis Accords’ space coalition
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UAE among eight countries in NASA ‘Artemis Accords’ space coalition
- NASA emphasized need for international partnerships in building up sustainable presence on the Moon
‘The Secret Agent’ — Brazilian political thriller lives up to the awards hype
DUBAI: Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s political thriller may be set during his homeland’s turbulent 1970s — under a military dictatorship that committed extensive human rights abuses — but this ambitious, layered, and beautifully realized movie is loaded with timely reminders of what happens when political violence and moral turpitude are normalized, and — in one memorable fantastical scene — when fake news turns into mass hysteria.
The film follows Marcelo (the compelling Wagner Moura), an academic working in engineering, who discovered that a government minister was shutting down his university department in order to funnel its research into a private company in which the minister owned shares. When Marcelo points out the corruption, he becomes a marked man and must go on the run, leaving his young son with the parents of his late wife. He is moved to a safe house in Recife, run by the sweet-but-steely Dona Sebastiana (an effervescent Tania Maria) on behalf of a resistance group. They find him a job in the government department responsible for issuing ID cards.
Here he meets the despicable Euclides (Roberio Diogenes) — a corrupt cop whose department uses a carnival as cover to carry out extrajudicial murders — and his goons. He also learns that the minister with whom he argued has hired two hitmen to kill him. Time is running out. But soon he should have his fake passport and be able to flee.
“The Secret Agent” is much more than just its plot, though. It is subtle — sometimes oblique, even. It is vivid and darkly humorous. It takes its time, allowing the viewer to wallow in its vibrant colors and equally vibrant soundtrack, but always building tension as it heads towards an inevitable and violent climax. Filho shows such confidence, not just in his own skills, but in the ability of a modern-day audience to still follow stories without having to have everything neatly parceled and dumbed-down.
While the director deserves all the plaudits that have already come his way — and there will surely be more at the Oscars — the cast deserve equal praise, particularly the bad guys. It would’ve been easy to ham it up as pantomime villains. Instead, their casual cruelty is rooted in reality, and all the more sinister for it. Like everything about “The Secret Agent,” they are pitch perfect.
