NASA’s Artemis 1 Orion capsule is exceeding expectations in space and remains on target to fly by the Moon on Monday (Nov. 21), agency officials said.
The Artemis 1 mission launched Wednesday morning (November 16) and sent an unmanned Orion to the Moon on a giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. This is Orion’s first-ever voyage beyond Earth orbit, but the capsule has been ticking boxes like a veteran, mission team members said.
“Orion has performed great so far,” said Jim Geffre, NASA’s Orion vehicle integration manager, during a news conference Friday afternoon (Nov. 18). “All systems exceed expectations in terms of performance.”
Related: Amazing Views of NASA’s Artemis 1 Lunar Rocket Debut (Photos)
live updates: NASA’s Artemis 1 Moon Mission
Orion will reach the Moon on Monday (November 21), gliding just 130 kilometers across the dusty gray surface at 7:44 am EST (1244 GMT). The mission plan calls for the capsule to conduct a crucial 2.5-minute engine burn during this close approach, a maneuver that will set the stage for insertion into lunar orbit four days later.
Artemis 1 team members will decide whether or not to commit to this powered flyby burn after a meeting on Saturday (November 19). However, it would be surprising at this point if they ended up changing the plan.
“Right now we’re looking good and we’re ready to proceed with execution,” Artemis 1 flight director Jeff Radigan said during Friday’s briefing.
That doesn’t mean the flight went perfectly smoothly. Thirteen anomalies, or “funnies,” have been discovered so far during the Orion cruise, mission team members said Friday.
One such problem was a series of erratic readings from Orion’s star trackers, which the capsule uses for navigation. This confused the team at first, but they eventually found that the trackers were being blinded by the glow from Orion’s engines during burns. After identifying the cause, the team was able to resolve the issue as it has the other 12 funnies, all of which were minor glitches.
The problems could be more severe for some of the 10 CubeSats launched on Artemis 1 as rideshares. While all of them deployed from the SLS upper stage as planned, only five are now behaving as expected, Artemis 1 mission leader Mike Sarafin said during the briefing.
ArgoMoon, BioSentinel, Equuleus, LunaH-Map and OMOTENASHI “are on the road to success,” Sarafin said.
The other five — LunIR, Lunar IceCube, NEA Scout, CuSP, and Team Miles — “either encountered technical issues post-deployment, or had intermittent communications, or in one instance, failed to receive a signal with the means of communication that they had planned,” he added.
However, Sarafin stressed that he and other Artemis 1 team members do not have the best or most up-to-date information about the CubeSats, which are independent spacecraft operated by a variety of different groups. OMOTENASHI, for example, is a tiny Japanese probe aiming to deploy a 2.2-pound (1-kilogram) lander on the lunar surface.
Sarafin also announced that Artemis 1’s mobile launch tower suffered some damage from the SLS, the most powerful rocket ever successfully launched.
For example, blast waves generated by the SLS’s 8.8 million pounds of thrust blasted the blast doors off the tower’s elevators during Wednesday’s launch, which was the first-ever for the giant rocket. (Orion had one flight prior to Artemis 1, a 2014 test flight to Earth orbit on a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket.)
That’s not exactly a surprise; The team had expected the SLS to do a bit of damage to the tower, Sarafin said. Technicians have not yet been able to fully assess the condition of the launch tower, but they are working on it.
“The team is taking great care to get full system status for the mobile launcher and they are working on it,” said Sarafin.
If all goes according to plan with Monday’s flyby, Orion will prepare for another pivotal engine launch on November 25. This will place the capsule in a far-moon retrograde orbit that will take Orion up to 40,000 miles (64,000 km) from the lunar surface.
The capsule will remain in this orbit until December 1, when it will perform another burn to put it on course for Earth. Orion will land softly under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on December 11 if all goes according to plan.
Mike Wall is the author of “out there (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaelwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @spacedotcom (opens in new tab) gold Facebook (opens in new tab).
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