by NASA’s Artemis 1 Orion capsule exceeds expectations in deep space and remains on track to fly past the moon Monday (Nov. 21), agency officials said.
The Artemis 1 mission launched Wednesday morning (Nov. 16), sending an unmanned Orion to the moon atop a massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. This is Orion’s first-ever trip beyond Earth orbit, but the capsule has ticked boxes like a veteran, mission team members said.
“Orion is performing great so far,” said Jim Geffre, NASA’s Orion vehicle integration manager, at a press conference Friday afternoon (Nov. 18). “All systems exceed expectations from a performance standpoint.”
Related: Stunning Views of NASA’s Artemis 1 Lunar Rocket Debut (Photos)
Live updates: NASA’s Artemis 1 lunar mission
Orion will reach the moon on Monday (Nov. 21), skimming just 80 miles above the dusty gray surface at 7:44 a.m. EST (1244 GMT). According to the mission plan, the capsule is to perform a crucial 2.5-minute engine burn during that close approach, a maneuver that paves the way for placement in lunar orbit four days later.
Artemis 1 team members will decide whether or not to commit to that “powered flyby burn” after a meeting on Saturday (Nov. 19). However, it would be surprising at this point if they ended up changing the plan.
“At this point, we look good and we’re ready to proceed with the execution,” Jeff Radigan, Flight Director of Artemis 1, said at Friday’s briefing.
That is not to say that the flight went smoothly. Thirteen anomalies, or “funny things,” have been discovered so far during Orion’s cruise, mission team members said Friday.
One such problem was a series of erratic measurements from Orion’s star trackers, which the capsule uses to navigate. This surprised the team at first, but they eventually determined that the trackers were blinded by the glow of Orion’s thrusters during burns. Now that the cause has been determined, the team has been able to fix the problem as they fixed the other 12 pranks, all of which were minor mistakes.
The issues may be more serious for some of the 10 cubesats launched on Artemis 1 as rideshare payloads. While all deployed from the SLS’s upper stage as planned, only five are now behaving as expected, Artemis 1 mission manager Mike Sarafin said at the briefing.
ArgoMoon, BioSentinel, Equuleus, LunaH-Map and OMOTENASHI “are on track for success,” Sarafin said.
The other five – those are LunIR, Lunar IceCube, NEA Scout, CuSP and Team Miles – “either experienced technical difficulties post-deployment or experienced intermittent communication or, in one case, failed to receive a signal with the means of communication she had planned” he added.
However, Sarafin stressed that he and other Artemis 1 team members don’t have the best or most up-to-date information about the cubesats, independent spacecraft controlled by different groups. OMOTENASHI, for example, is a small Japanese probe that aims to drop a 2.2-pound (1-kilogram) lander onto the lunar surface.
Sarafin also announced that the Artemis 1 mobile launch tower was slightly damaged by the SLS, the most powerful rocket ever successfully launched.
For example, pressure waves generated by the SLS’s 8.8 million pounds of thrust blew the blast doors off the tower’s elevators during Wednesday’s launch, the first ever for the giant rocket. (Orion had one flight under its belt before Artemis 1, a 2014 test flight to orbit atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket.)
That’s not exactly a surprise; the team had expected the SLS to give the tower a beating, Sarafin said. Technicians have not yet been able to fully assess the condition of the launch tower, but they are working on it.
“The team is taking an abundance of caution to get the full system state for the mobile launcher, and they’re working their way through that,” Sarafin said.
If all goes according to plan with Monday’s flyby burn, Orion will gear up for another critical engine firing on Nov. 25. That will put the capsule into a distant retrograde lunar orbit, which will take Orion as far as 40,000 miles (64,000 miles). km) from the lunar surface.
The capsule will remain in that orbit until December 1, when it will burn up again to put it on a course for Earth. Orion will drop gently under parachutes into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on December 11, if all goes according to plan.
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
