NASA’s Orion
spacecraft zipped past the moon’s far side on Monday, passing within 130km of
the surface.
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The spacecraft, which
has no humans on board, has been traveling toward the moon since Wednesday,
when it launched as part of the Artemis I mission. Its journey will last 20
more days.
“The vehicle continues
to operate exceptionally,” Howard Hu, Orion program manager at NASA, said
during a news conference on Monday evening.
One of the mission’s
main purposes is to verify that the Orion spacecraft works as designed, and to
allow NASA to make any necessary adjustments and fixes before astronauts board
for the Artemis II mission, which will not take off until at least 2024. The
third Artemis mission, involving the Orion spacecraft as well as a SpaceX
vehicle, will aim to land astronauts on the moon’s surface.
A few minutes before
Orion’s closest pass with the moon on Monday, the capsule fired its engine for
2.5 minutes. That accelerated its velocity as the spacecraft swung outward
toward what is known as a distant retrograde orbit.
The orbit is distant —
64,000km above the lunar surface; retrograde means that the spacecraft is
traveling around the moon in the direction opposite to the way the moon travels
around Earth.
The spacecraft will be
there for six days, providing an extended period of time for mission
controllers to test out Orion’s systems. NASA pointed out that it would be the
farthest that any spacecraft designed to carry humans had ever been from Earth.
(The previous record occurred during Apollo 13 when the crippled spacecraft had
to swing around the moon for the trip back to Earth instead of entering orbit.)
Before the flyby, a
camera on Orion provided sharp video of the moon growing ever larger as the
spacecraft approached, capturing an earthset — the small blue marble of Earth
slipping behind the big gray disk of the moon in the foreground.
With Orion behind the
moon, NASA’s mission controllers lost contact with the spacecraft, as planned.
Thus, they did not know that the engine firing had succeeded until Orion
emerged again 34 minutes later.
The spacecraft
demonstrated its ability to send live video back to
Earth during the flyby,
said Judd Frieling, a NASA flight director, who added it would transmit more on
a NASA website when possible.
The Orion also took
video and images of the moon’s far side while it was out of contact behind the
moon.
“It will take us a few
days to get those particular images down,” Frieling said.
Artemis I lifted off
on November 16 on top of NASA’s big new Space Launch System rocket from the
Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Except for minor
glitches, the Artemis I flight has proceeded smoothly. The funnies included
Orion’s star trackers being momentarily confused when the spacecraft’s thrusters
fired.
“We are on flight day
six of a 26-day mission,” Sarafin said Monday, “so I would give it a cautiously
optimistic A+.”
The service module —
the part of Orion below the capsule that houses the thrusters, solar arrays,
communications equipment and other supplies — was built by Airbus, and was one
of the contributions by the European Space Agency to the Artemis program. The
module will not return to Earth but, instead, will be jettisoned to burn up in
the atmosphere shortly before the capsule splashes down.
On Friday, the
thrusters on the service module will fire again to put Orion into the distant
retrograde orbit. On Saturday, Orion will pass the Apollo 13 record of 400,171km
from Earth for a spacecraft designed to carry astronauts; next Monday, Orion
will reach its maximum distance from Earth: nearly 435,000km.
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