Tag: orion
NASA Orion Captures View That Looks Like ‘Apollo 13’ Movie Poster – CNET
NASA’s Orion spacecraft snaps some mind-bending images from the moon
The Orion spacecraft had an intimate brush with the lunar terrain on Monday, hugging the moon’s curves just 80 miles above the surface.
Shortly after it emerged around the bend, NASA‘s moonship delivered some mind-warping photographs that flipped the script on our place in space: The crescent rising in the distance was not the object folks are accustomed to seeing as a clipped fingernail in the sky.
It was us.
“In this view, we see 8 billion human lives, all existing upon our pale blue dot, our blue marble, our very own Spaceship Earth,” said Sandra Jones, broadcasting live commentary from mission control in Houston. “And after a long journey, Orion is now coming home.”
The close approach to the surface involved a 3.5-minute engine firing to increase the moonship’s speed over 650 mph, or 960 feet per second. The maneuver was crucial for giving Orion the slingshot it needed to get back to Earth and complete the Artemis I flight test.
Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter today.
Though no one is inside Orion for this 25-day maiden voyage, a successful empty flight will clear the way for astronauts aboard the spaceship next time, with a sequel mission involving a crew slated for as early as 2024.
NASA wants to one day build a lunar-orbiting base, known as Gateway, and ferry astronauts back-and-forth to a moon camp, where it will send the first woman and person of color to walk at the moon’s south pole. There astronauts will spend long stretches conducting research and gathering samples.
All the while, the agency will keep one eye fixed on the red planet some 140 million miles in the distance. The goal is to use the moon as a training ground for sending humans to Mars.
During Monday’s flyby, NASA lost touch with Orion as anticipated for about a half-hour as the spacecraft crossed behind the moon and harnessed its gravity to accelerate. The moon blocks the signal to NASA’s Deep Space Network, the giant Earth-based radio dish system that allows communication with spacecraft throughout the solar system. Mission control regained contact with the moonship immediately after.
NASA expects the spacecraft to splash down in the Pacific Ocean in five days on Dec. 11.
Orion spacecraft reenters moon’s gravity on its way home
NASA’s Artemis splashdown will put Orion through a nail-biting test
The Orion moonship may weigh 25 tons, but in a few days, it will skip like a slight pebble across a pond before plummeting thousands of feet through the air to its target in the Pacific Ocean.
The capsule has begun saying farewell to the moon, with just one more space flyby scheduled for Monday, Dec. 5, before heading home. Already NASA has deployed a crew to San Diego, California, to join the Navy at sea for training exercises to prepare for its unprecedented return.
NASA plans to bring Orion back with a so-called “skip entry” into Earth’s atmosphere. It’ll be the first time the U.S. space agency has ever tried the technique with a passenger spacecraft. The maneuver involves the moonship traveling at an unfathomably high speed and enduring scorching temperatures.
“Orion will come home faster and hotter than any spacecraft has before,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters in August. “It’s going to hit the Earth’s atmosphere at 32 times the speed of sound, it’s going to dip into the atmosphere, and bleed off some of that speed, before it starts descending through the atmosphere.”
Credit: NASA
Mission leaders say the advantage is breaking up the intense G-force loads — the heavy feeling pushing against a body during extreme acceleration — into two smaller events rather than one severe episode. Though the capsule doesn’t have any people onboard now, NASA believes mastering the skip entry will keep Artemis astronauts who would experience those effects safer in the future. When humans are subjected to forces much greater than normal gravity, their hearts are put under tremendous stress, causing dizziness and sometimes blackouts.
But when the capsule comes back in about a week on Dec. 11, NASA will have to prove Orion can actually survive the ordeal. The re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere will be a nail-biting grand finale to Artemis’ maiden 25-day space voyage, with success hinging on the new Lockheed Martin-built heat shield. The hardware it’s protecting will have to withstand up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA.
Imagine an inferno half the temperature of the sun’s surface.
“That heat shield on the back end is going to show us how we’ve taken that material from the Apollo days and brought that into the 21st century,” said Kelly DeFazio, Lockheed’s Orion production director, in August. NASA hopes to put astronauts in Orion as early as 2024 for a ride around the moon. The first landing on the lunar surface would follow on Artemis III, possibly one year later.
Credit: NASA
When Orion plunges toward Earth, it will be traveling 24,500 mph. By comparison, the Space Shuttle’s descent reached about 17,500 mph, Nelson said. That initial dip into the upper air will use the atmosphere to slow the capsule down to about 300 mph. Then, it will re-enter for a final descent, slowing down even more with parachutes.
By the time Orion hits water, it should be coasting at 20 mph. NASA will have live coverage of the event beginning at 11 a.m. ET, with the splashdown at about 12:40 p.m., on Dec. 11.
“Orion will come home faster and hotter than any spacecraft has before.”
The idea of a skip entry has existed on paper since NASA’s Apollo days half a century ago but was never attempted. Spaceships then didn’t have the navigational systems and computer power to execute it.
“Apollo was just strictly a direct entry, so that pretty much your landing site was set earlier on, when you departed the moon, with only a minor ability to adjust,” Chris Edelen, deputy manager for Orion integration, told Mashable during a briefing on Wednesday.
Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter today.
Credit: NASA
For Apollo missions, the spacecraft dipped into Earth’s atmosphere and then could travel up to 1,725 miles horizontally before plopping down into the ocean. A swarm of ships and rafts dispersed at sea waited on standby for the recovery operation because of such a vast range of possible places it could fall, according to the U.S. space agency.
But during a skip entry, Orion should be able to fly over 5,500 miles beyond the point it initially pokes into the upper air, giving the capsule more control over where it ultimately splashes down. NASA gets that extra wiggle room by bouncing back out of the atmosphere, where there is little drag on the spacecraft.
“One of the major advances with Artemis is that the spacecraft has the ability…to steer up and out of a denser part of the atmosphere, glide farther downrange or less downrange, so that you can pick the best landing site,” Edelen said.
Credit: NASA / Tony Gray
Credit: NASA / Kim Shiflett
The goal is to drop Orion into the water closer to the U.S. coastline, allowing crews to get to weary returning astronauts quicker and reduce the number of boats, helicopters, and divers needed to get the job done.
Most Apollo moon missions concluded with re-entries into Earth’s atmosphere that put astronauts through the wringer of 6Gs, or six times the normal force of gravity. Apollo 16, the second to last crewed moon mission, had the highest G-level, tipping just over 7Gs.
If all goes according to plan, the three test dummies in Orion — Commander Moonikin Campos, Helga, and Zohar — will instead face two rounds of 4G-level forces. That’s a little more intense than what carnival-goers might experience on a spinning Gravitron, the superfast centrifuge ride that pins people against the wall with about 3.2 times the normal force of gravity.
Perhaps it’s a blessing the two female mannequins aren’t wearing helmets. As limbless torsos, they’d have a hard time hanging onto their hats.
Stellaris’ 3.6 Orion update warps in new galaxy shapes and a combat rebalance
Being interested in both sci-fi and strategy games, I’ve always wanted to reshape the galaxy. The free 3.6 Orion update for Paradox’s spacey grand strategy Stellaris is live now, and it’s done that, but in a way I hadn’t quite imagined. Among the changes with this update are six new galaxy shapes to mix up the pattern of your interstellar empires a bit. Orion also rebalances fleet combat, bringing in elements of the open beta that began back in October. Paradox have chucked in a few reworks of bits and pieces from Stellaris’ numerous expansions too, including changes to the Utopia DLC’s Ascension path. You can see more about that by watching the video below.
NASA’s Orion photographed the Earth and Moon from a quarter-million miles away
The Orion spacecraft’s record-setting distance from Earth made for stunning photography, apparently. NASA has shared a photo taken by the Artemis I vehicle on Monday showing both Earth and the Moon in the background. Much like some Apollo photography or Voyager 1’s “Pale Blue Dot,” the picture puts humanity’s home in perspective — our world is just one small planet in a much larger cosmos.
Orion took the snapshot around its maximum distance from Earth of 268,563 miles. That’s the farthest any human-oriented spacecraft has traveled, beating even Apollo 13’s record of 248,655 miles from 1970. Notably, Artemis I represents the first time explorers intended to travel this far out — Apollo 13 only ventured so far from Earth because NASA’s emergency flight plan required the Moon as a slingshot.
Ars Technicanotes that this early Artemis flight has so far surpassed NASA’s expectations. While the mission team has only completed 31 out of 124 core objectives so far, it’s adding goals like extended thruster tests. About half of the remaining activities are in progress, with the rest largely dependent on returning to Earth.
Orion is expected to splash down off the San Diego coast on December 11th. The Artemis program has dealt with numerous delays, and now isn’t expected to land humans on the Moon until 2025 or 2026. NASA originally hoped for a lunar landing in 2024. Still, Artemis I’s current performance suggests the space agency’s efforts are finally paying off.
Nasa’s Orion capsule reaches new ground on demonstration mission around moon
Rocket footage shows awesome new view of Orion spacecraft launch
NASA’s Orion spacecraft pictured orbiting Moon halfway through milestone test flight
NASA’S Orion spacecraft was yesterday orbiting the Moon halfway through its milestone test flight.
The capsule — with three mannequins instead of astronauts — fired up its engines on Friday.
The spacecraft was yesterday orbiting the Moon halfway through its milestone test flight[/caption]
In the next few days of orbit, Orion is expected to reach a record 270,000 miles from Earth.
The mission is part of Nasa’s £4billion Artemis project, which is aiming for a 2025 lunar landing, the first since the Apollo 17 flight in 1972.
Last week, mission control in Houston briefly lost contact with Orion.
Nasa’s Jim Geffre said of the mission: “It’s about challenging ourselves to go farther, stay longer and push beyond the limits of what we’ve previously explored.”
READ MORE ON NASA
The update comes after the Artemis 1 mission lifted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on, Wednesday, November 16 at 1.04am EST.
Nasa held a number of webcasts prior to the unmanned Artemis 1 launch, which served as the Space Launch System rocket’s first test flight with its Orion spacecraft.
Most read in The Sun