NASA mission successfully performs lunar flyby maneuver

The Orion capsule worked as expected and Artemis 1 performed its lunar flyby according to NASA’s plans this Monday (21). It is the first of four major powered maneuvers on which the mission depends for its successful completion, with a landing in the Pacific on the 11th.

The spacecraft lost contact with Earth around 9:30 am (Brasília time), as it transited the far side of the Moon. It was there, amid the radio blackout, at 9:44 am, that the service module’s main thruster ignited for two and a half minutes, to accelerate the spacecraft to around 930 km/h.

The spacecraft’s signal was recovered at 9:59 am, when Orion beamed back beautiful images of the “pale blue dot”—a view of the mostly illuminated Earth as seen from the lunar surroundings.

Right now, Artemis 1 is moving away from the Moon, having passed within 129.6 km of the surface. Next Friday (25th), the second major maneuver will come: another shot of the main engine will place the spacecraft in a distant lunar retrograde orbit. In short, Orion will be flying clockwise at an altitude of around 40,000 miles.

The plan is to leave it in that orbit for about a week. On the 28th, it will become the human-carrying ship to have traveled farthest from Earth. NASA estimates it at around 429,000 km. The previous record holder was Apollo 13, which reached a distance of 401,000 km in 1970.

The difference, of course, is that Artemis 1 is flying without a crew. On board, only a dummy, equipped with radiation sensors that will be analyzed after returning to Earth. The expectation is that everything goes well until the 11th, with a safe return of the capsule, paving the way for a manned mission.

Scheduled for 2024, Artemis 2 should carry four astronauts to the vicinity of the Moon, in a similar mission profile (but a little simpler) than that carried out by the Apollo 8 crew, in 1968.