NASA’s ambitious Artemis January mission is to return to the pad one last time before launch.
The Artemis 1 stack is scheduled to travel approximately 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) from the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Facility 39B on Aug. 18, NASA confirmed Friday. With this rollout, Artemis 1 will be on track for her week-long unmanned journey around the Moon by August 29th.
Artemis 1 will pace the Space Launch Systems (SLS) Megarocket and Orion spacecraft, ensuring reliability before similar flights are made by astronauts in the years to come. Fruiting.
The next launch follows rigorous system certification and more than a decade of planning.
“Our team has been working very hard for a very long time,” said Rick Lablaude, Artemis 1 flight director at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, during a live-streamed briefing on Friday. He added that the mission is “very special. We’re very excited.”
Related: NASA’s Artemis January Mission: Live Update
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Artemis 1 will be the first-ever launch for SLS and the second for Orion, which reached Earth orbit in 2014. If all goes according to plan on August 29th, the SLS will roar through the atmosphere and reach orbit. Only 8.5 minutes. The giant rocket’s upper stage will deploy Orion into a translunar injection orbit about 80 to 90 minutes after launch.
These milestones kick off Orion’s 42 action-packed days in space, assuming the launch takes place on August 29 (mission timings vary slightly depending on launch date).
Judd Frieling, JSC’s Artemis 1 Climb and Entry Flight Director, said:
As Orion soars toward the Moon, the upper stage of the SLS will be tasked with deploying CubeSats for the Moon and other sciences while thrusting itself into orbit around the Sun.
Orion targets the Moon’s retrograde orbit. It stays there for a few weeks and returns to Earth from the Moon with the help of gravity.
This spaceship has three main goals in Artemis 1, each designed to demonstrate durability. Mission team members ensure that Orion can pass safely through Earth’s atmosphere, that it can operate in a “flight environment” from launch to landing, and that the astronauts are kept safe inside during return recovery. I hope to show you what I can do.
Outreach activities, such as taking solar panel selfies, try to keep the public engaged during long journeys (because Orion’s data transfer speeds are possible from deep space).
For example, “When an actual human-rated spacecraft reaches the furthest it’s ever gone, the farthest any Apollo vehicle has gone, we want to capture that in a public relations event.” Labrode said..
Related: How NASA astronauts landed Artemis on the moon
The final major milestone of Orion’s mission will be a high-speed re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere toward a landing site off the coast of San Diego. Descend under a parachute into the Pacific Ocean and perform a ‘heading for landing’ maneuver just before you arrive, sliding perpendicular to the ocean waves.
There, the vehicle will remain powered on for about two hours to test how well Orion can keep the astronauts cool. A U.S. Navy ship will then retrieve Orion and fish the rover out of the water, his NASA official said.
After the mission, there will be months of analysis to confirm that SLS and Orion are indeed ready to carry humans. The current schedule calls for Artemis 2 to launch a crew to orbit the moon in 2024, and Artemis 3, the first manned lunar landing mission since Apollo 17 in 1972, to land her on the surface by 2025. is required.
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