Orion makes its first orbit around the moon: ‘The torch is passed’

Five days after launch, the Orion lunar capsule completed its first orbit around the moon. The spacecraft flew over the surface at a speed of more than 5,500 kilometers per hour at an altitude of 130 kilometers.

NASA is using Orion for the Artemis program, which is supposed to return people to the moon after fifty years. In this case it is an unmanned flight, intended to gain experience for manned travel in two years. Instead of four lunar travelers, there are now three test dummies on board that measure the forces to which the crew is exposed.

Orion became launched last Wednesday on a rocket higher than the Groningen Martinitoren. That behemoth was only needed for the first nine minutes to get the crew the size of two large RVs on their way to the moon.

Now that Orion has landed on the moon after a journey of nearly 400,000 kilometers, NASA has used the moon’s gravity to pull the capsule into a large orbit around the celestial body. In six days the capsule will reach a distance of 65,000 kilometers from the Moon, the farthest ever reached by a lunar probe returning to Earth.

To make that course correction, Orion’s engines had to be fired for 2.5 minutes to get the correct flight path. Orion then passed behind the moon for the first time, resulting in a half-hour loss of communication with the capsule, as expected.

After a few minutes of waiting, Orion offered flight control a look at Earth:

A NASA commentator made a comparison with the famous photos Rising of the Earth in Pale blue dot. The first was an “earthrise” image taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, the second a retrospective view from Voyager 1 in which the Earth is little more than a fragile blue dot in an infinite universe.

See the featured images of the Apollo 8 mission and the Voyager 1 photo here

“There we see our blue point arise, along with his eight billion inhabitants“On the shoulders of the giants of the Apollo generation, Orion passes the baton to the Artemis generation”. foot on the moon in 1969.

Orion is expected to return to Earth on December 11th.