NASA lost contact with the Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft for 47 minutes
NASA unexpectedly lost contact with its Orion capsule on the moon early Wednesday morning (Nov. 23) for reasons that remain unclear.
No crew Orion since then it has performed well launch to the moon last Wednesday (Nov. 16) by NASA Artemis 1 mission. But this Wednesday (Nov. 23) brought a moment: Mission controllers lost communication with Orion at 1:09 a.m. EST (0609 GMT) while reconfiguring the link between the capsule and Deep Space Networkthe set of radio dishes that NASA uses to talk to its distant spacecraft.
“The reconfiguration was successfully performed several times over the past few days, and the team is investigating the cause of the signal loss,” NASA officials wrote in brief update on wednesday (opens in new tab).
“The team resolved the ground-side reconfiguration issue,” they added. “Engineers are studying the event data to help determine what happened, and the command and data processing officer will transfer the data recorded aboard Orion during the outage to include in this assessment.”
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The blackout lasted 47 minutes, and Orion emerged from it in good shape; the spacecraft is healthy and has suffered no apparent ill effects, NASA officials said.
Orion is preparing for a crucial maneuver: It is scheduled to perform an engine burn on Friday (November 25), which will put the capsule into orbit around the moon. If all goes well, Orion will remain in this orbit for about a week before returning to Earth on December 1.
The capsule will arrive here by parachute into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on December 11.
Artemis 1 is a rocking cruise for Orion and NASA’s giant Space Launch Systemon the most powerful rocket ever fly successfully. The duo is scheduled to fly with astronauts for the first time in 2024 on Artemis 2, which will send a crewed Orion around the moon.
Artemis 3 will follow a year or so later, landing astronauts near the moon’s south pole — where NASA is seeking to build a manned outpost, one of the main goals of Artemis program.
Mike Wall is the author of “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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