Orion’s moon capsule is back. What happens next?

Microsoft
By Microsoft 7 Min Read

“It’s a historic achievement because we are now returning to deep space with a new generation,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said after the Orion crash. “This is a defining day. It’s one that marks new technology, a whole new breed of astronaut, a vision for the future.

During Sunday’s descent, the three parachutes fully inflated, braking the spacecraft to slow it from 25,000 mph to just 20 as it hurtled through the atmosphere. But now the Artemis team will study all the metrics of the capsule in detail. “First we’ll look at: Has the heat shield done its job of rejecting heat and taking care of the heat pulse such that the internal cabin pressure stays at a moderate mid-70 degrees for the astronauts when they’re there?” says Sarah D’Souza, deputy systems director at NASA’s Ames Research Center who helped develop Orion’s thermal protection system.

That ablative heat shield is made of thick, connected blocks of an epoxy resin material called Avcoat, which ignites when the shield withstands scorching temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, about half the surface temperature of the sun. They want to be sure, he says, that “we have a design that will keep humans safe.”

Nelson also stressed human safety and habitability during a post-sketch press conference. “This time we go back to the moon to learn how to live, to work, to invent, to create, in order to go to the cosmos to explore further,” she said. “The plan is to prepare to go with humans to Mars in the late 2030s, and beyond that.”

Orion was originally scheduled to land off the coast of San Diego, but the weather forecast made that impossible and the flight director altered its trajectory. This flexibility comes thanks to a maneuver the team has attempted to call a re-entry “jump,” in which Orion descended partially through the atmosphere to an altitude of about 40 miles, then hopped up and on like a pebble that skims over a pond, and then entered the atmosphere forever. This type of reentry also helps slow down the spacecraft.

Reentry brought Orion within 0.02 degrees of the team’s planned flight angle, and splashdown in the ocean was nearly a target, approximately 2 nautical miles from the intended landing point. Once the slides lowered, all five balloon-like bags inflated, keeping Orion upright in the water. NASA and Navy officials from the recovery team, in helicopters and boats, then approached, preparing to recover the spacecraft and stow it in the belly of the USS. Portland for the return trip to shore.

In the coming months, the Artemis team will also study data taken from communications systems and the many space radiation sensors connected to the three mannequins aboard Orion. (A stuffed Shaun the Sheep character also participated in the journey.) That information, important for maintaining a habitable crew capsule and ensuring communication between the craft and engineers on the ground, will help the team prepare for Artemis 2. On this trip, scheduled for 2024, astronauts will fly around the moon in a second version of the Orion spacecraft and explore potential landing spots for the third mission. NASA and its international and commercial partners are already working on that new capsule, the Space Launch System rocket and boosters that will launch it, and the European service module that propels, powers and cools it. The team may change the design of some of these systems based on their analysis of Artemis 1.

NASA already knows that much went well on the 26-day, 1.4-million-mile maiden mission: despite numerous launch delays caused by persistent hydrogen leaks and the unfortunate arrival of a hurricanethe massive SLS rocket successfully took off on November 16th. The upper stage rocket was then deployed 10 small satellites, who performed their own side missions. Orion traveled within 80 miles of the lunar surface and on Nov. 28 traveled the farthest from Earth a manned spacecraft has ever gone, at about 269,000 miles from home. And on Dec. 5, Orion’s cameras snapped photos of the Moon and Earth during its last lunar flyby, an homage to the iconic “Earthrise” image taken by astronaut Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8 in 1968.

But some of those mini missions failed. The CubeSat to Study Solar Particles, or CuSP, had what the agency called an “unexplained battery anomaly,” and so the research team lost touch with it. Japan’s OMOTENASHI lunar lander failed to reach the moon. NASA has also lost contact with the asteroid NEA Scout and an infrared lunar mapper called LunIR. The prospects are not good for them, but they are not necessarily doomed: NASA has lost contact with the Capstone spacecraft in July and then restored, and is now successfully orbiting the moon. But these small satellites have limited battery power and some cannot be recharged while the rocket’s launch is delayed. This means that their batteries have run out.

Despite these challenges, the Artemis program is now well underway, exactly half a century after the last Apollo mission. Following Artemis 2’s manned orbit around the moon, Artemis 3 will bring the first woman and first black person to its surface—the first people to walk on the moon since Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schnitt’s landing in the Taurus Valley— Littrow in 1972. Later missions it will deliver and assemble modules for the Gateway space station which will orbit the moon and could serve as a way station and testing ground for future expeditions to Mars.

Yesterday, as Orion crashed gently into the ocean, NASA commentator Rob Navia reflected on the significance of that achievement. “From Tranquility Base at Taurus-Littrow to the calm waters of the Pacific, the latest chapter in NASA’s journey to the moon comes to a close. Orion, back on Earth,” he said. He described Orion as NASA’s “new ticket to the moon and beyond.”

Share This Article
Leave a comment