Preliminary information from the Artemis I unmanned space mission, which will end with a splashdown on Sunday, gives confidence for “more complex missions”, such as taking astronauts to the Moon, a NASA engineer told Efe news agency.
In an interview with the Spanish agency, NASA aerospace engineer Rosa Ávalos-Warren, mission chief of the Manned Space Flight Communications and Monitoring Network, recalled that the objective of the mission that took off on November 16 is to put test all systems and ships (SLS rocket and Orion capsule) involved.
“All these different phases had to work together to be able to send Orion on a good trajectory, so that it could reach the Moon, and everything was completed satisfactorily,” said the Peruvian-born aerospace engineer, quoted by Efe.
The mission is on track to be “totally successful, with some additional objectives achieved,” Artemis I mission manager Mike Sarafin said.
What remains to be analyzed, according to Ávalos-Warren, are the data that Orion brings, pointing to “a more specific determination” regarding the launch dates of the following missions, Artemis II and III, both manned.
NASA’s plans are to send Artemis II in 2024 and, the following year, Artemis III, missions in which astronauts, including a woman and a non-white man, would touch the sun of Earth’s natural satellite for the first time since 1972, the year of the Apollo XVII mission.
The United States space agency will be able to conclude, in just over six months, the first analysis of the set of information produced by Artemis I, which will travel a total of 2.1 million kilometers in 26 days on its round trip.
At the end of November, the Orion capsule was 434,522 kilometers from Earth, the maximum reached by a spacecraft designed to transport humans, surpassing the 1970 record set by the Apollo 13 mission.
In the ditching scheduled for Sunday, the capsule will cross the Earth’s atmosphere at 520 kilometers per hour and will be subjected to temperatures of 2,800 degrees, equivalent to half the surface temperature of the Sun, the NASA engineer told Efe.
The system of 11 parachutes will make it reach the Pacific Ocean, near the island of Guadalupe, off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, at a speed of 27 kilometers per hour.
If all goes according to plan, the Orion will land at 12:40 pm on the east coast of the United States (5:40 pm in Lisbon), and will be picked up by a US Navy ship, and then it will go to Kennedy Space. Center, in Florida.
Source: TSF
