After visiting the Moon and venturing farther into space than any previous habitable spacecraft, NASA’s Orion capsule will touch down in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, the final leg of the high-risk Artemis 1 mission for the Space Agency. USA.
The capsule will enter the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 40,000 km/h and will have to endure an infernal heat of 2,800°C, half the temperature of the Sun’s surface. Landing is planned off the Mexican island of Guadalupe at 17:39 GMT.
The success of this mission, which will have lasted just over 25 days in total, is crucial for NASA, which has invested tens of billions of dollars in the US return-to-the-Moon program. Artemiswhose objective is to prepare a future trip to Mars.
Heat Shield Earrings
The first test flight of this new vehicle, this time without a real crew on board, has so far been a real success. But it is during the last minutes of the mission when you must fulfill His principal object: test the heat shield of the capsule, the largest ever built (5 m in diameter).
“It’s a critical piece of safety, designed to protect the spacecraft and its passengers,” explained Mike Sarafin, mission manager. “The heat shield has to work.”
A first test of the capsule was carried out in 2014, but then it had not left Earth orbit, and therefore had entered the atmosphere more slowly (about 32,000 km/h).
Initial results from Artemis I give confidence
The preliminary information obtained from the Artemis I unmanned mission gives confidence in the face of “more complex missions”, such as that of put astronauts on the moon in 2025says NASA aerospace engineer Rosa Ávalos-Warren, of Peruvian origin.
In an interview with EFE, the mission manager of the Communications and Tracking Network for Manned Space Flights recalled that the goal of this mission that took off on November 16 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (USA) is to test all systems and ships (the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule) involved.
“All these different phases had to work together to be able to send Orion on a good trajectory in order to reach the Moon, and everything has been accomplished satisfactorily,” said the Peruvian-born engineer, who works at the Flight Center NASA Goddard Space Center.
Now, as Ávalos-Warren points out, what remains is to study the data that Orion brings with a view to achieving “a more specific determination” regarding the confirmation of the launch dates of the following missions, Artemis II and Artemis III, both manned, “always with the safety of the astronauts as the number one priority.”
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NASA’s plans They are sending Artemis II in 2024 and the following year Artemis III, in which astronauts, including a woman and a man of color, would touch the ground on the satellite for the first time since 1972, when those sent to the Moon did so. with the Apollo XVII mission.
The US space agency could conclude in just over six months the first analysis of all the information produced by Artemis I, which will cover a total of 2.1 million kilometers in 26 days on its round trip.