NASA’s uncrewed Orion capsule yesterday hurtled through space on the final return leg of its voyage around the moon and back, winding up the inaugural mission of the Artemis lunar program 50 years to the day after Apollo’s final moon landing.
The gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, carrying a simulated crew of three mannequins wired with sensors, was due to parachute into the Pacific at 5:39pm GMT near Guadalupe Island, off Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.
Orion was nearing the end of its 25-day mission less than a week after passing about 127km above the moon in a lunar fly-by and about two weeks after reaching its farthest point in space, nearly 434,500km from Earth.
Photo: EPA-EFE
After jettisoning the service module housing its main rocket system, the capsule was expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at 39,400kph for a fiery, 20-minute plunge to the ocean.
Orion blasted off on Nov. 16 from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop NASA’s towering next-generation Space Launch System (SLS), now the world’s most powerful rocket and the biggest NASA has built since the Saturn V of the Apollo era.
The debut SLS-Orion voyage launched Apollo’s successor program, Artemis, aimed at returning astronauts to the lunar surface this decade and establishing a sustainable base there as a stepping stone to future human exploration of Mars.
By coincidence, the return to Earth of Artemis I unfolded on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 moon landing of astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on Dec. 11, 1972. They were the last of 12 NASA astronauts to walk on the moon during a total of six Apollo missions starting in 1969.
Re-entry is the single most critical phase of Orion’s journey, testing whether its newly designed heat shield can withstand atmospheric friction expected to raise temperatures outside the capsule to nearly 2,760°C.
“It is our priority-one objective,” NASA’s Artemis I mission manager Mike Sarafin told a briefing last week. “There is no arc-jet or aerothermal facility here on Earth capable of replicating hypersonic re-entry with a heat shield of this size.”
It would also test the advanced guidance and thruster systems used to steer the capsule from the moon to its proper re-entry point and through descent.
“It’s essentially like throwing a football 300 yards [274m] and hitting a penny,” said Eric Coffman, Orion propulsion senior manager at Lockheed Martin Corp, which built Orion under contract with NASA.
An internal navigation and control system commands 12 on-board thrusters, fixed in recessed positions along the base of the capsule, to fire bursts of propellant as needed to keep the capsule oriented correctly and on course, he said.
The heat, speed and forces exerted on Orion on its return from the moon would exceed those endured by spacecraft making more routine descents from the International Space Station or other flights from low-Earth orbit.
Orion is also programmed to employ a novel “skip entry” descent in which the capsule briefly dips into the top of the atmosphere, flies back out and re-enters — a braking maneuver that provides more control in steering the vehicle closer to its intended splashdown target.
If Artemis I is deemed a success, a crewed Artemis II flight around the moon and back could come as early as 2024.
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