NASA had a pretty scare recently when it lost contact with its Orion shuttle for 47 minutes. But despite the many problems that have plagued the Artemis I mission since its inception, it remains a great success for the US space agency.
This Saturday, November 26, 2022, the capsule even broke the record for distance from Earth for a habitable spacecraft, set in 1970 during the very eventful Apollo 13 mission. Astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise had moved away of 400,171 km and almost never returned following the explosion of an oxygen supply in the ship’s service module.
A superb selfie of the Earth-Moon system
We have already published a number of images since the takeoff of the SLS rocket carrying Orion on November 16th. On the occasion of this record, the spacecraft captured a very beautiful selfie souvenir photo with the Earth and the Moon in the background, visible just below.
In this image captured recently, the Earth-Moon system appears tiny in the vastness of space, enough to feel very small. At the time of this shot, the capsule, which is currently in a distant retrograde orbit around our natural satellite, was approximately 431,000 km from our planet, a few kilometers from its maximum distance from Earth for the Artemis I mission. (434,500 km).
A successful mission?
Orion still has work to do before returning to Earth and landing in the Pacific Ocean on December 11. If the capsule is to begin its return soon, it still has tests to carry out. The objective of Artemis I is indeed to prepare the next trip around the Moon of the ship, which will be inhabited this time. Thus, the navigation systems, the resistance of the ship or the trajectories are put to the test and analyzed.
To guarantee the safety of future astronauts, the spacesuits on board have also been equipped with sensors to measure the level of radiation to which the crew will be subjected during the Artemis II mission, scheduled for 2024. During the latter, the astronauts will however remain on board the capsule and it will be necessary to wait until 2025/2026 at the earliest, with the Artemis III mission, to hope to see a human again set foot on the Moon.
The objective will then be to establish a permanent human presence on our satellite in order to explore our neighbour, the planet Mars.