The Orion capsule reaches half of its projected journey while transmitting live images in high resolution
NASA’s unmanned mission Orion capsule Artemis I reached the maximum distance this Monday achieved by any spacecraft from Earth: 434,522 kilometers (270,000 miles), thus exceeding the record distance of Apollo 13, as this day marks the halfway point of the journey that began in Florida on November 16.
At 4:06 p.m. Eastern US time (2106 GMT) “an important milestone” was reached with the distance reached by Orion and its three mannequins on board, since they left the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Rick confirmed at a press conference. Labrode, flight director of Artemis I. The Orion, which travels at 5,102 mph (8,200 km/hour), thus broke the record for the farthest distance traveled from Earth by any spacecraft designed to be crewed by humans, according to NASA.
At the press conference, which took place from the Johnson Space Center in Houston (Texas), were also Mike Sarafin, manager of the Artemis mission; Vanessa Wyche, director of the aforementioned center, and Howard Hu, administrator of the Orion program, who congratulated themselves on the “milestones” achieved.
While flying in a distant lunar retrograde orbit, meaning it is far from the Moon and in orbit opposite the moon’s path around Earth, the Orion spacecraft continues transmitting live images in high resolution. According to Space.com, the new images represent the highest-definition live view from beyond the Moon to date, although several Apollo missions have broadcast from that area in the 1960s and 1970s, it added. “Artemis is paving the way to live and work in deep space in a hostile environment and ultimately bring humans to Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told the news conference.
On the thirteenth day of the flight of the Artemis I mission, after having traveled hundreds of thousands of kilometers around the Moon in the Orion spacecraft, the ship’s commander, the mannequin Moonikin Campos, assured via Twitter that he had had “a very busy day ” taking selfies with the Moon in the background and collecting data from lunar orbit. The mannequin, which at the same time is a superhero in a NASA comic, takes its name in honor of the American Arturo Campos, an electrical engineer of Mexican origin who was “fundamental” in saving the crew of Apollo 13, according to the US space agency.
Last Friday, Orion entered a distant lunar orbit, where the spacecraft will stay for about a week to test various systems in a deep space environment, some 40,000 miles above the lunar surface, before beginning the return journey to Earth. Land. A week ago, the mission reached another important milestone, its closest lunar approach, flying just 80 miles (128 km) above the lunar surface.
Orion’s return to Earth is scheduled for December 11 with a splashdown off the coast of California, in the Pacific Ocean, after a journey of 25 days, 11 hours and 36 minutes, according to NASA data. . The general objective of the Artemis program is to establish a base on the Moon as a previous step to reach Mars in the future.. To do this, after Artemis I, NASA will launch Artemis II into lunar orbit in 2024, with a crew, and the takeoff of Artemis III is expected for 2025, a mission in which astronauts, including a woman, would touch the ground of the satelite.
NASA had to delay the departure of the mission four times, twice for technical reasons and another two for meteorological reasons. Finally, on November 16, the SLS, the most powerful and largest of all NASA rockets, with a height greater than a 30-story building (322 feet or 98 meters), lifted off from Florida propelling the Orion.