Jordan became the 63rd signatory of the Artemis Accords, NASA announced on Thursday.
The Artemis Accords are an international agreement that lays out the “principles for cooperation in the civil exploration and use of the Moon, Mars, comets, and asteroids for peaceful purposes,” according to the website.
The accords were initially signed in October 2020. The initial signatories were Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the UAE, the UK, and the US.
Other countries, including Israel and India, have signed the accords over the past 5.5 years.
Jordan is the fourth country to join the accords in 2026, following Portugal (January 12), Oman (January 26), and Latvia (April 20).
The Artemis Accords are co-led by the US’s State Department and NASA. It was grounded in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and is a non-binding set of principles “designed to guide civil space exploration and use in the 21st Century.”
They establish a “common political understanding regarding mutually beneficial practices in the exploration and use of outer space,” NASA says.
NASA also writes 10 principles of the accords, including “Peaceful purposes, transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, registration of space objects, release of scientific data, protecting heritage, utilization of space resources, deconfliction of activities, and planning to mitigate orbital debris and disposal of spacecrafts.”
Source:
www.jpost.com
