“On the sixth day of its mission, @NASA_Orion approached the Moon, passing over several Apollo landing sites and as close to 80 miles (128 km) above the lunar surface,” said NASA. Source: NASA, Twitter.
The Artemis I moon rocket is well and truly into its mission after the Orion capsule passed 130km above the lunar surface yesterday morning.
It was travelling at a speed of 8210 kph and was some 370,000 km from Earth when it flew past the moon, however the Orion lost contact with Houston for about 34 minutes during the maneuver.
Flight Director at NASA Zebulon Scoville called this phase of the mission a “game-changer”.
“This is one of those days that you’ve been thinking about and dreaming about for a long, long time.
“This morning, we just saw the Earth set behind the Moon as we take the next human-rated vehicle around the Moon, preparing to bring humans back there within a few years. This is a game-changer.”
NASA will now move onto the next stage of the Artemis I mission which will see the spacecraft enter a distant retrograde orbit around the moon.
This will take place on Friday November 25 after the Orion is maneuvered into position via several orbital trajectory correction burns. Experts at NASA explained what the distant retrograde orbit entails.
“The orbit is “distant” in the sense that it’s at a high altitude from the surface of the Moon, and it’s “retrograde” because Orion will travel around the Moon opposite the direction the Moon travels around Earth,” they said.
“This orbit provides a highly stable orbit where little fuel is required to stay for an extended trip in deep space to put Orion’s systems to the test in an extreme environment far from Earth.”
Orion will see several records broken, including the farthest distance travelled by a spacecraft designed for humans, when it reaches its maximum distance of 432,000 km from Earth on Monday November 28.
Teams at NASA are happy with how things are going so far.
“The mission continues to proceed as we had planned, and the ground systems, our operations teams, and the Orion spacecraft continue to exceed expectations, and we continue to learn along the way about this new, deep-space spacecraft,” said Mike Sarafin, Artemis I mission manager.
