Artemis I mission achieves historic first flight over the Moon

by time news

“This has been achieved on the shoulders of giants of the Apollo generation,” NASA said when the mission Artemis I, the unmanned test for humanity to return to the Moon, managed to fly over our natural satellite for the first time this morning. The Orion capsule, the same one in which astronauts will travel in the future, passed about 130 kilometers from the lunar surface in a maneuver designed to send it into a distant retrograde orbit.

The motorized flyby, broadcast live by the US space agency, took place five days after the 98-meter-tall Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket, the most powerful in the world, took off from Florida (USA). .) with Orion at one end. The overflight began at 1:44 p.m. Spanish peninsular time and came dangerously close to the lunar surface, at a distance just above the distance between Madrid and Ávila. The approach was a critical moment, since there was a danger that something would go wrong and the ship would fall on the Moon.

The loss of communication with the spacecraft for 34 minutes as it passed behind the Moon, despite being expected, has also added to the tension. The Goldstone (California) ground station, which is part of the NASA Deep Space Network together with the Robledo de Chavela, and Canberra (Australia) station, has re-established communication once Orion has emerged from behind the Moon.

“This is one of those days that you have thought about for a long time, since you were a child. We are going to put a vehicle around the Moon. This changes the rules of the game,” they say from NASA.

A second maneuver, scheduled for Friday, will insert Orion into the distant retrograde orbit, so named because it rotates in the opposite direction of the Moon’s motion around Earth. The spacecraft will come to a distance of 432,000 kilometers from our planet and will remain in that orbit for six days before flying close to the Moon again and returning.

The Earth, seen from the Orion capsule

NASA

The first flyby was awaited with expectation.

thirteen anomalies

In these five days, the journey of Artemis I is going as expected, but it has not been without its problems. NASA engineers have detected thirteen anomalies, most of them classified as “benign”.

One of the most important failures was found in the ship’s navigation system: it sent data from anomalous readings of the stars that serve as reference, which could affect the course of the ship. In addition, half of the CubeSats, the small probes that accompanied the mission for scientific purposes, do not behave as expected.

You may also like

Leave a Comment