The antennas of the Deep Space Communications Complex in Madrid have captured the signal from the Orion spacecraft as it left behind the Moon
Artemis 1 already orbits the Moon. The antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Communications Complex in Madrid, located in Robledo de Chavela, have captured the signal from the Orion spacecraft leaving behind the Moon at 1:59 p.m. In its first flyby of the satellite, the NASA capsule has passed only about 130 kilometers from the lunar surface.
six days after
its takeoff from Cape Canaveral On the largest rocket ever built, Orion is already in distant retrograde orbit, a trajectory that will take it 432,000 kilometers beyond the Moon, farther than any other manned spacecraft has gone. Today Orion has become the first capsule to orbit the Earth’s satellite since December 1972, when, on the Apollo 17 mission, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt set foot on the Moon while their partner Ronald Evans awaited them in orbit.
Earth as seen by the Orion capsule from lunar orbit. /
If all goes well on this unmanned test flight as NASA envisions, the mission’s next critical moment will come on December 11. So, the Orion capsule will have to withstand temperatures of up to 2,800º C during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere at 40,000 kilometers per hour. If the ship completes the mission and lands safely in the Pacific, off San Diego, the next takeoff of the
artemis program It will take four astronauts to lunar orbit in 2024, in a flight similar to the current one.
NASA’s goal is for the third mission to put the first woman on the satellite no earlier than 2025. In fact, the US space agency still does not have a lunar module, so there are many who doubt that it can be fulfilled it’s calendar. After Artemis 3, there will be more manned missions to the Moon until, early in the next decade, NASA and ESA build a permanent base at the satellite’s south pole.
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