Artemis 1’s Orion capsule is still on track to fly by the moon on Monday
NASA’s Artemis 1 Orion capsule is exceeding expectations in deep space and remains on target to fly to the moon on Monday (Nov. 21), agency officials said.
The Artemis 1 mission started on Wednesday morning (Nov. 16), sending Orion unmanned toward the moon atop a huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. This is Orion’s first trip outside Earth orbit, but the capsule has checked the boxes like a veteran, mission team members said.
“Orion is performing great so far,” said Jim Geffre, NASA’s Orion Vehicle Integration Manager, during a press briefing Friday afternoon (Nov. 18). “All systems exceed expectations in terms of performance.”
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Orion will reach The moon on Monday (Nov. 21), passing just 81 miles (130 kilometers) above the dusty gray surface at 7:44 a.m. EST (1244 GMT). The mission plan called for the capsule to perform a crucial 2.5-minute engine burn during this close approach, a maneuver that would initiate insertion into lunar orbit four days later.
Artemis 1 team members will decide whether or not to commit to this “powered flyby burn” after a meeting on Saturday (November 19). It would be surprising at this point though if they ended up changing the plan.
“We’re looking good right now and we’re ready to continue the execution,” Artemis 1 Flight Director Jeff Radigan said during Friday’s briefing.
That doesn’t mean the flight went perfectly smoothly. Thirteen anomalies, or “funnies,” have been discovered so far during Orion’s cruise, mission team members said Friday.
One such problem was a set of erratic readings from Orion’s star trackers, which the capsule uses for navigation. This initially puzzled the team, but they eventually determined that the trackers had been blinded by the glow from Orion’s thrusters during a burn. With the cause identified, the team was able to address the issue as they have the remaining 12 amusements which were minor issues.
The problems may be more serious for some than 10 cubesats launched on Artemis 1 as payloads for carpooling. While all of them were deployed from the SLS upper stage as planned, only five are now behaving as expected, Artemis 1 mission manager Mike Sarafin said during the briefing.
ArgoMoon, BioSentinel, Equuleus, LunaH-Map and OMOTENASHI “are on the way to success,” Sarafin said.
The remaining five — which are LunIR, Lunar IceCube, NEA Scout, CuSP and Team Miles — “either encountered technical problems after deployment, experienced intermittent communications, or in one case failed to receive a signal with the communications asset that had planned for them.” , he added.
However, Sarafin emphasized that he and other members of the Artemis 1 team do not have the best or most up-to-date information about cubesats, which are independent spacecraft operated by multiple different groups. OMOTENASHI, for example, is a small Japanese probe that aims to drop a 2.2-pound (1-kilogram) lander on the lunar surface.
Sarafin also revealed that Artemis 1’s mobile launch tower was damaged somewhat by the SLS, the most powerful missile ever successfully launched.
For example, pressure waves generated by the SLS’s 8.8 million pounds of thrust blew off the tower’s elevator doors during Wednesday’s liftoff, the first for the giant rocket. (Orion had one flight before Artemis 1, a 2014 test flight to Earth orbit atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV heavy rocket.)
That’s not exactly a surprise; The team had expected the SLS to beat the tower a bit, Sarafin said. Technicians have not yet been able to fully assess the condition of the launch tower, but are working on it.
“The team is working out of an abundance of caution to get the full system status for the mobile launch device, and they’re working their way through that,” Sarafin said.
If all goes according to plan with Monday’s flyby burn, Orion will prepare for another key thruster firing on November 25. This one will put the capsule into a lunar far retrograde orbit that will take Orion to within 40,000 miles (64,000 km) of the moon’s surface.
The capsule will remain in this orbit until December 1, when it will perform another burn to head for Earth. Orion will splash quietly under parachutes on December 11 in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, if all goes according to plan.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl 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).
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