How does any of that matter for this mission, which will not be landing on the moon?
reply> How does any of that matter for this mission
replyThis is a fair question. The closest answer I can get is eyes and ears onboard complement sensors.
It's also rehearsing/testing/experience gathering for an eventual mission that will land people on the Moon again. Missions don't happen in isolation.
reply> Missions don't happen in isolation
replyTrue. I wasn’t thinking about training the ground crews.
Only in the last few minutes, the livestream actually covered various goals this mission - explicitly a test mission - is meant to achieve. For example, one they just mentioned is they're going to be doing some docking maneuvers practice.
replyThis is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.
To test the stuff that will allow to land humans on the moon
replyAre you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troctolite_76535
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt#NASA_career)?
replyYes, and more!
reply > Apollo was over three orders of magnitude more efficient in producing scientific papers per day of fieldwork than are the MERs. This is essentially the same as Squyres’ (2005) intuitive estimate given above, and is consistent with the more quantitative analogue fieldwork tests reported by Snook et al. (2007).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectro...