WASHINGTON - Nasa’s Orion capsule barrelled through Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday after making an uncrewed voyage around the Moon, winding up the inaugural mission of the US agency’s Artemis lunar programme, 50 years to the day after Apollo’s final Moon landing.
The gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, carrying a simulated crew of three mannequins wired with sensors, plunked down in the ocean at 9.40am PST (1.40am on Monday, Singapore time) off Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, demonstrating a high-stakes homecoming before Nasa flies its first crew of Artemis astronauts around the Moon in the next few years.
“This was a challenging mission, and this is what mission success looks like,” Nasa’s Artemis I mission manager Mike Sarafin told reporters after the splashdown, adding that his team did not immediately notice any issues with Orion’s return from space.
A US military helicopter and a group of fast boats approached the capsule after splashdown for about five hours of inspections, before Orion was hoisted aboard a United States naval vessel for a trip to San Diego, California.
The splashdown capped a 25-day mission less than a week after the capsule passed about 127km above the Moon in a lunar fly-by, and came about two weeks after reaching its farthest point in space, nearly 434,500km from Earth.
Roughly 30 minutes before splashing down, the capsule at 9am committed to its fiery, 20-minute plunge at 39,400kmh into Earth’s atmosphere when it shed its service module, exposing a heat shield that reached peak temperatures of nearly 2,760 deg C during its blazing-fast descent.
Atmospheric friction slowed the capsule from 39,400kmh to 523kmh, followed by two sets of parachutes that helped brake its speed to an expected 32kmh at splashdown.
The capsule showed a “perfect” descent rate, said Nasa commentator Rob Navias on a live stream of the return.
Orion blasted off on Nov 16 from the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop Nasa’s towering next-generation Space Launch System (SLS), now the world’s most powerful rocket and the biggest Nasa has built since the Saturn V of the Apollo era.
The debut SLS-Orion voyage kicked off Apollo’s successor programme, Artemis, aimed at returning astronauts to the lunar surface this decade and establishing a sustainable base there as a stepping stone to future human exploration of Mars.
Mission engineers will spend months examining data from the Artemis I mission.
A crewed Artemis II flight around the Moon and back could come as early as 2024, followed within a few more years by the programme’s first lunar landing of astronauts, one of them a woman, with Artemis III.
Nasa expects to name its crew of astronauts for the Artemis II mission in early 2023, Nasa’s Johnson Space Centre director Vanessa Wyche told reporters.
Though Orion encountered some unexpected communication blackouts and an electrical issue during its voyage around the Moon, Nasa has given high marks to the performance of both SLS and Orion so far, boasting that they exceeded the US space agency’s expectations.
“This has been an extraordinarily successful mission,” Nasa administrator Bill Nelson told reporters.
By coincidence, the return to Earth of Artemis I unfolded on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 Moon landing of astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on Dec 11, 1972. They were the last of 12 Nasa astronauts to walk on the Moon during a total of six Apollo missions starting in 1969.
The Artemis programme, named after the twin sister of Apollo, marks a major turning point for Nasa, redirecting its human spaceflight programme beyond low-Earth orbit after decades focused on space shuttles and the International Space Station.
Re-entry marked the single most critical phase of Orion’s journey, testing whether its newly designed heat shield can withstand atmospheric friction and safely protect astronauts who would be on board.
“It is our priority-one objective,” Nasa’s Mr Sarafin said at a briefing last week. “There is no arc-jet or aerothermal facility here on Earth capable of replicating hypersonic re-entry with a heat shield of this size.”
Nasa officials have stressed the experimental nature of the Artemis I mission, marking the first launch of the Boeing-built SLS and the first combined with Orion, which previously flew a brief two-orbit test launched on a smaller Delta IV rocket in 2014. The capsule was built by Lockheed Martin.
Compared with Apollo, born of the Cold War-era US-Soviet space race, Artemis is more science-driven and broad-based, enlisting other countries and commercial partners such as Mr Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the space agencies of Europe, Canada, and Japan.
Orion’s European Space Agency (ESA)-supplied service module, a housing for its propulsion system that was jettisoned before the capsule’s descent into Earth’s atmosphere, “performed beautifully”, ESA’s mission manager Philippe Deloo said in a statement.
“This is a great day not only for America, but it’s a great day for all of our international partners – that’s the difference from 50 years ago,” Mr Nelson said.
REUTERS
