The 'Orion' capsule landed this afternoon on the coast of Baja California after a 25-and-a-half-day lunar mission

Image Source - Google | Image by-U.S. Navy

Test passed. The Orion spacecraft of the Artemis I unmanned mission docked this afternoon in the Pacific Ocean, near the Mexican island of Guadalupe, off the coast of Baja California, at 6:40 p.m. (in Catalonia). The schedule and location planned by NASA, which thus successfully closes its project to return to the Moon 50 years after the last trip, certifying that it has a safe system. NASA will hold a press conference this Sunday at 9:30 p.m. to explain the details of the operation, which you can watch live in the video below. It was a preparatory mission to send astronauts back there in 2025, which would include the first non-white person and the first woman to set foot on the Moon. In fact, these missions are another step towards thebig goal of the American aerospace agency , which goes further and still has no date: to send humans to Mars.


"It's historic, we're starting a new stage in deep space with a new generation of technology," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said excitedly in statements to the American space agency, shortly after the Orion mooring.



After docking, the Navy ship USS Portland will tow the ship to a military base in San Diego, California. NASA technicians have begun to collect information on how the ship has impacted the ocean waters to find out, among other things, what effect the high temperatures it has reached during its journey have had on the crew cabin back and entering the Earth's atmosphere. It should be noted that both the thermal shield of the ship and the mooring trajectory are new.




Precisely, part of the success of the mission is explained by the fact that the shield has withstood the 2,800 degrees Celsius, equivalent to half the temperature of the surface of the Sun, which the ship has had to withstand and confirms that it has a safe technique for manned flights. It is a newly designed five-meter-wide mechanism that has never been tested in today's conditions, mission director Mike Sarafin said at a press conference on Thursday. In this mooring, the eleven parachutes installed have been activated to slow down the speed as the ship approaches the waters of the Pacific which, in just 20 minutes, have allowed it to pass, of the 523 kilometers per hour with which it has touched the earth's atmosphere until the 32 with which it has dived into the ocean.




NASA expects to finish the first analyzes of all the information collected during this trip before the summer. When this scientific task is completed, the technicians will have more elements to be able to specify the launch dates of the following missions, Artemis II, in 2024, and Artemis III, a year later, both already manned.


26 days in space

The Artemis I mission lifted off on November 16 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after two failed attempts due to technical problems that were eventually resolved. In this first flight, the Orion capsule did not carry astronauts but human-sized dolls to make a simulation as realistic as possible of future missions. For 25 days and 10 hours, the device has been located only 128 kilometers from the lunar surface and has orbited around the satellite. In total, it has traveled 2.253 million kilometers and reached a distance of 434,552 kilometers from Earth, surpassing the record of Apollo XIII.