Washington. After passing close to the Moon and venturing farther into space than any previous habitable spacecraft, NASA’s Orion capsule will splash down in the Pacific on Sunday, the final leg of the risky Artemis 1 mission.
The capsule will enter the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 40,000 kilometers per hour, and will have to endure a hellish heat of 2,800 degrees Celsius, or half the temperature of the Sun’s surface.
The splashdown is scheduled off the Mexican island of Guadalupe at 17:39 GMT.
The success of this mission, which will last just over 25 days in total, is crucial for NASA, which has invested tens of billions of dollars in the US Artemis return-to-the-Moon program, which aims to prepare a future trip to Mars.
The first test flight of this spacecraft, this time without astronauts on board, has so far been a success.
But the real challenge will be in the final minutes, when the mission must fulfill its main objective: to test Orion’s heat shield, the largest ever built (five meters in diameter).
“It’s a critical piece of safety, designed to protect the spacecraft and its passengers,” explained Mike Sarafin, the Artemis 1 mission manager. “The heat shield has to work.”
In 2014, a first Orion test was carried out, but then the capsule did not leave Earth orbit, and therefore entered the atmosphere more slowly, at about 32,000 kilometers per hour.
Helicopters, divers and boats
A US Navy ship, the USS Portland, has positioned itself in the Pacific to retrieve the Orion capsule, in a move NASA has rehearsed for years. Helicopters and inflatable boats will also be used for this.
The spacecraft will be slowed down first by Earth’s atmosphere and then by 11 parachutes, reaching a speed of about 30 kilometers per hour when it finally collides with the blue waters of the Pacific.
NASA will let Orion float for two hours, much longer than it would have spent with astronauts on board, in order to gather data.
“We will see how the heat is absorbed by the capsule and how this affects the interior temperature,” said Jim Geffre, head of Orion at NASA.
Divers will then attach cables to the Orion to load it onto the USS Portland, an amphibious transport ship whose rear end will be partially submerged. The water will then be pumped out, allowing the capsule to be slowly deposited on a specially designed platform to support it.
The operation is expected to last between four and six hours from the moment of splashdown.
The USS Portland will then head to San Diego, California, where the capsule will be unloaded days later.
When the mission is complete, the spacecraft will have traveled more than 2.2 million kilometers in space since lifting off on November 16 during the maiden flight of NASA’s new megarocket, the SLS, that propelled it.
Orion passed the Moon only about 130 kilometers from its surface, and ventured more than 430,000 km from Earth.
artemis 2 and 3
Recovering the capsule will allow NASA to gather crucial data for future missions.
It will provide you with information about the state of the spacecraft after the flight, but also about the accelerations and vibrations suffered on board, and about the performance of a vest that a dummy carried inside the capsule to test the protection that a human would have against radiation during space travel.
Some capsule components are expected to be reused in the Artemis 2 mission, which is already in advanced planning stages.
This second mission, scheduled for 2024, will take a crew to the Moon, although without landing. NASA is expected to announce the names of the chosen astronauts very soon.
Artemis 3, officially scheduled for 2025, will land a spacecraft on the moon’s south pole for the first time, where there is water in the form of ice.
Only twelve men, all white, have set foot on the lunar surface in the Apollo missions, the last one in 1972, 50 years ago.
The Artemis program plans to send a woman and a non-white person to the Moon for the first time.
NASA’s goal is to establish a permanent presence on the Moon, with a base on its surface and a space station in its orbit.
Learning to live on the Moon would allow testing of all the technology needed for a multi-year trip to Mars, possibly in the late 2030s.
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