Artemis I Mission Highlights
NASA has released a video (above) featuring highlights from its successful Artemis I mission, which ended on Sunday with the homecoming of the Orion spacecraft.
The video tells the story of the historic mission, which used NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to propel the uncrewed Orion on a journey across the moon before returning to Earth.
In the course of the voyage, Orion used its onboard cameras to beam back amazing imagery of the moon and Earth, a few of which appears in NASA’s highlights video.
Artemis I used to be a test mission as a part of preparations for the crewed Artemis II flight that can take the identical path, possibly in 2024, and a crewed lunar landing, expected to happen in 2025 or 2026.
“From launch to splashdown, NASA’s Orion spacecraft accomplished its first deep-space mission with a splashdown within the Pacific Ocean, west of Baja California, at 9:40 a.m. PT (12:40 p.m. ET) Sunday,” NASA said in a message accompanying the video.
During its 25-day mission, the Orion capsule traveled greater than 1.4 million miles, entering a distant orbit across the moon involving two flybys that took the vehicle to inside just 80 miles of the lunar surface.
NASA’s spacecraft also set a recent record for the furthest distance traveled from Earth by a human-rated spacecraft, and remained in space longer than any astronaut-ready capsule without docking to an orbital outpost corresponding to the International Space Station (ISS).
The mission led to dramatic fashion on Sunday when the Orion spacecraft endured temperatures of around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit because it entered Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of virtually 25,000 mph before slowing to about 20 mph for a parachute-assisted splashdown.
“The splashdown of the Orion spacecraft, which occurred 50 years to the day of the Apollo 17 moon landing, is the crowning achievement of Artemis I,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said on Sunday following Orion’s homecoming. “From the launch of the world’s strongest rocket to the exceptional journey across the moon and back to Earth, this flight test is a significant step forward within the Artemis Generation of lunar exploration.”
Looking further ahead, NASA is planning to construct the primary everlasting base on the lunar surface, where astronauts will have the ability to live and work in the same technique to how they do today on the ISS. The moon could even act as a launch point for the primary crewed missions to Mars, which could happen within the 2030s.
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