An illustration of the space shuttle Orion ©NASA
Leaving Florida on Wednesday morning, November 16, the Orion spacecraft is already delivering its first images of Earth. A few hours after the launch of the SLS rocket which propelled the shuttle towards the Moon, NASA released a photo and a 24-second video. And they have enough to make you dizzy.
As a reminder, its mission, the first part of the Artemis program, is to place itself in orbit around our natural satellite and then return quietly to Earth. This is to test its equipment and its trajectories before sending a team of astronauts to the Moon to establish a permanent base there in the years to come.
“Smile, you’re being filmed!”
The photo shared by NASA shows part of the spacecraft, which takes up a quarter of the image, and the Earth in the lower right corner, alone in the middle of nothingness, as if lost. German astronaut Alexander Gerst sums up the image very well: “Smile, you’re on camera! Fascinating view of Nasa’s Orion spacecraft, en route to the Moon. Even more fascinating, the little blue planet in the corner. Every one of us humans is in this picture. Really, everything the world”, he wrote on Twitter.
Taken by one of the cameras on Orion’s solar-panel wings, this is the first photo of Earth taken by a human shuttle traveling more than 50,000 km since the last Apollo mission in 1972, explain our colleagues from Florida Today.
Even more impressive perhaps, the 24-second video released by NASA shows the Earth gradually shrinking as Orion moves away from it at a speed of 5,000 km/h.
A ship lined with cameras
During its 25-day journey, the spacecraft will send us many other pictures of our little blue marble and probably even of the Earth-Moon system. Orion is indeed very well equipped for this, since the device has a total of 16 cameras with image definitions ranging from SD to 4K, details the American agency in a blog post. They are primarily intended to document the trip scientifically and to allow NASA teams to identify any technical problems.
The network of cameras installed on the Orion shuttle ©NASA
That’s why most exterior cameras are focused on Orion, not space. A group of devices is also placed inside the cockpit, in the direction of the windows, in order to reproduce what the astronauts present on board would see.
In fact, NASA has cleverly placed the cameras according to each stage of the journey, so that all the technical phases such as takeoff, separation with the SLS rocket, deployment of the solar panels or landing can be studied. Without neglecting the moments when Orion will offer us an exceptional point of view on the Moon and the Earth.
On the other hand, it will be necessary to wait a little before discovering the most beautiful shots of the ship, the bandwidth for downloading the images being limited. To wait, you can still follow Orion’s journey live.