JAKARTA – NASA’s Orion spacecraft, launched on the Artemis 1 mission to the Moon, has now made its furthest trip from Earth, eclipsing any spacecraft designed to carry astronauts into space.
Quoted from the report space. comThe unmanned Orion was able to fly equal to the record for the longest distance previously achieved by the command module of the Apollo 13 spacecraft “Odyssey” on April 14, 1970.
This is around 8:40 am EST (1340 GMT) on Saturday (11/26), within 248,655 miles of Earth (216,075 nautical miles or 400,171 kilometers).
Even though they were able to record greater distances than other spacecraft, in fact both Orion and Apollo 13 were actually launched, not to break the record for this distance.
The original Apollo 13 flight plan did not call for the spacecraft to travel that far.
As is widely known, and featured in the 1995 Hollywood film, the Apollo missions originally targeted the moon landings. But suddenly the goal has changed to return the astronauts to Earth safely after a mid-flight explosion ripped through the vehicle’s service module. (vehicle service form).
Due to the explosion and the efforts to return the astronauts to Earth safely, Apollo 13 finally reached the distance that became the record. They stayed away because there was an urgent need to use the moon’s gravity to catapult the spacecraft to Earth as quickly and safely as possible.
Meanwhile, the Artemis 1 mission is designed to suppress the Orion system, so that NASA keeps it in a distant retrograde orbit (lunar distant retrograde orbit).
Because the orbit is so large (with an altitude above the moon), this NASA spacecraft can match Apollo 13’s record.
If Orion remained on its originally planned course, it could not even exceed the distance traveled by Apollo 13. NASA estimates that the Artemis 1 Orion capsule will be able to reach a maximum distance of 268,553 miles (432,194 km) from Earth, at about 4:06 PM EST (2106 GMT) this Monday (11/28).
From that distance, Orion will continue its journey around the moon until it fires its Orbital Maneuvering System motor, to leave a distant retrograde orbit, preparing for its second flyby of the lunar surface on Dec. 5. Before returning to Earth on December 11th.
While it may surpass the Apollo 13 distance record, NASA’s Artemis 1 Orion flight certainly won’t break the record for the furthest flight by a human astronaut from Earth, which will still be held by James Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert , the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13.
Because Orion currently flies completely without a human crew, but contains only an astronaut dummy named “Moonikin Campos” – taken from the name Arturo Campos, the electrical power subsystem manager who played a major role in the mission to bring back the Apollo astronauts 13 to Earth after the accident they experienced.
“Moonikin Campos” was used on this Artemis 1 launch as a tool to measure radiation exposure and stress crew members might experience during a flight to the moon on subsequent missions.
If all goes to plan, NASA is likely to launch the next Artemis mission to the Moon with human astronauts in 2024.
