NASA Engineers Add More Orion Tests to Mission (Video)
Artemis 1 is almost home and NASA is already preparing for the next stages.
The Orion spacecraft of Artemis 1 is expected to splash over the Pacific Ocean on Sunday (December 11), and the agency is already looking ahead to future missions of the Artemis program.
“Artemis 1 and Orion have been phenomenal,” Nujoud Merancy, chief of the Exploration Mission Planning Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, told Space.com in a video interview. Orion was tasked with flying around the Moon to collect data for future manned missions, and so the mission has gone so well, with only minor errorsthat NASA felt comfortable adding more tasks to the manifesto.
“The whole point [and] The goal of this mission was to validate that we’ve designed the rocket and spacecraft correctly, and it’s exceeding expectations to the point that we were actually adding targets with Orion,” Merancy added.
In the photos: Artemis 1 Launch: Incredible Views of NASA’s Moon Rocket Debut
The main goal of the Artemis 1 mission will be to complete the reentry and high-speed splashdown, which so far is on track for Sunday (Dec. 11). The mission also accomplished other key goals, including testing the unflyable Space launch system and flying in a distant retrograde orbit the moon to assess the readiness for human occupation of the Orion spacecraft.
More analysis will come after the drop to see how Orion did, Merancy said. “All the data recorded during the mission will be reviewed by the engineers and teams to make sure it matches our predictions. This is really the plan going forward.”
when Artemis 2 fly around the moon with astronauts around the year 2024, it will be a test of Orion life support systems as they were not included in Artemis 1. The crew has not yet been announced, but the mission design is complete, Merancy said.
After that will be the first manned landing on the Moon, which is expected to be in 2025 or so with Artemis 3which will start a series of excursions to the south pole of the Moon along with those planned by NASA Entrance door space station in orbit.
“There’s a lot to do,” Merancy added of mission planning, but added that the Artemis team will take some time to celebrate Artemis 1’s success during the fall.
“There will be a viewing party here in Johnson on Sunday to see how it goes,” Merancy said. “I’ll bring the family, and we’ll be here to celebrate like everyone else.”
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller? (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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