Photo: NASA
We’re more or less five days into the Artemis I mission, and the Orion spaceship that’ll form the backbone of crewed missions to the Moon is getting ready for something NASA calls “outbound powered flyby.” And it’ll all start on Monday, November 21, at 5:15 am ET.
According to the latest update from NASA on the Orion flight, the spaceship is already “in the lunar sphere of influence,” meaning it is the Moon now, and not the Earth, that has the greatest gravitation pull on the ship.
The outbound powered flyby will require the firing of the orbital maneuvering system engine for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. That’ll accelerate Orion and put it into position to use the Moon’s gravitational pull as to "enter a distant retrograde orbit beyond the Moon.”
According to NASA, the “outbound powered flyby burn is the first of a pair of maneuvers required” to put the spaceship on this path. NASA will livestream the event on its YouTube channel starting with 5:15 am ET on Monday.
The flight seemed like a smooth one so far, but a series of problems seem to loom on the horizon. The latest ones came as a series of faults in the random access memory in the ship’s systems. Although they have all been successfully recovered, teams are looking closer into what may have caused them.
As per the space agency, the faults caused “one of eight units located in the service module that provides solar array power to the crew module," to open without a command. It was closed without issues each time, “and there was no loss of power flowing to avionics on the spacecraft.”
Today marks an important day in the Artemis I mission, so a lot of updates are expected to come our way in the coming hours.
The outbound powered flyby will require the firing of the orbital maneuvering system engine for 2 minutes and 30 seconds. That’ll accelerate Orion and put it into position to use the Moon’s gravitational pull as to "enter a distant retrograde orbit beyond the Moon.”
According to NASA, the “outbound powered flyby burn is the first of a pair of maneuvers required” to put the spaceship on this path. NASA will livestream the event on its YouTube channel starting with 5:15 am ET on Monday.
The flight seemed like a smooth one so far, but a series of problems seem to loom on the horizon. The latest ones came as a series of faults in the random access memory in the ship’s systems. Although they have all been successfully recovered, teams are looking closer into what may have caused them.
As per the space agency, the faults caused “one of eight units located in the service module that provides solar array power to the crew module," to open without a command. It was closed without issues each time, “and there was no loss of power flowing to avionics on the spacecraft.”
Today marks an important day in the Artemis I mission, so a lot of updates are expected to come our way in the coming hours.
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