![]() ![]() As the spacecraft plummeted, atmospheric friction heated its exterior to more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or roughly half as hot as the surface of the sun. The next time it touched Earth’s air, instead of skimming across the atmosphere like a skipping stone, Orion dove all the way through. Traveling about 25,000 miles an hour, the spacecraft performed what’s called a skip reentry, briefly dipping in and out of the atmosphere’s outskirts to bleed off speed before making a second, final plunge. The most crucial-and dangerous-test happened today, when Orion left space and made its high-speed return to Earth. “With a new launch vehicle and a really complicated mission, it’s exciting to see that it’s working so well.” “It’s been an incredible success, and the issues that have arisen have been really minor, as far as we know,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a space historian and curator of the Apollo collection at the National Air and Space Museum. They tested its propulsion, communication, life support and navigation systems-and found no major issues. NASA managers put the spacecraft through its paces and challenged it to stay functional in the hostile environment of deep space for much longer than a typical crewed mission would last. During its 26-day mission, Orion traced a record-setting path around the moon, looping to within 80 miles of the lunar surface-and, at its farthest, flying beyond the moon to a point about 270,000 miles from Earth. ![]() Launched in the wee hours of November 16, Artemis I is the first flight test of NASA’s massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the first lunar foray of the agency’s crew-rated Orion spacecraft. “Artemis is paving the way to live and work in deep space, in a hostile environment-to invent, to create and ultimately to go on with humans to Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters nearly two weeks before the splashdown. And now, after a journey of 1.4 million miles, NASA’s Orion spacecraft is safely back on Earth-marking the completion of the agency’s Artemis I mission and the first step toward returning humans to the moon. But the trial shows that CAPSTONE can still contribute to NASA's moon efforts going forward.Fifty years ago today humans landed on the lunar surface for the last time during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission. The six-month milestone, which occurred on May 13, officially concluded the primary mission of the little cubesat. The May 9 test came just a few days before the six-month anniversary of CAPSTONE's insertion into lunar orbit. "This capability could provide autonomous onboard navigation information for future lunar missions." "The test proved the ability to collect measurements that will be utilized by CAPS software to determine the positioning of both spacecraft," NASA officials wrote in an update last week. CAPSTONE beamed a signal to LRO, which bounced it back to the tiny spacecraft, where it was converted into a measurement of the distance and relative velocity between the two probes. Six days later, the CAPSTONE team used the cubesat to test navigation technology similar to GPS on Earth called the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System (CAPS).ĭuring the successful May 9 experiment, CAPSTONE teamed up with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been circling the moon since 2009. The microwave-sized satellite imaged the lunar surface for the first time on May 3, as it made a close pass by the north pole. In the NRHO, CAPSTONE gets as close as 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometers) to one lunar pole during a near pass and then as far away as 43,500 miles (70,000 km) from the other pole every seven days.
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