Artemis I highlights View of our European Service Module | ASTRONOMY
Artemis I highlights
View of our European Service Module that is powering NASA's Orion spacecraft, pointing at our planet and the Moon, taken on the 13th day of flight for the Artemis I mission at 22:06 CET, 28 November 2022. It shows Orion and the European Service Module halfway through the Artemis I mission near its maximum distance from Earth, at 432210 km from our home planet and over 64 000 km from the Moon. Seen from the spacecraft our planet had just passed behind the Moon when this photo was taken, as Orion was in lunar orbit.
On flight day six of the Artemis I mission, Orion used its optical navigation camera to snap this black-and-white photo of the Moon.
A portion of the far side of the Moon looms large just beyond the Orion spacecraft in this image taken on the sixth day of the Artemis I mission by a camera on the tip of one of Orion’s solar arrays.
On the sixth day of the Artemis I mission, Orion’s optical navigation camera captured black-and-white images of craters on the Moon below.
A camera mounted on one of Orion’s solar array wings captures Earth as it sets behind the Moon ahead of the outbound powered flyby, an approximately 2 minute, 30 second burn (speeded up in this video) that committed the spacecraft to a distant retrograde orbit.
Update: The Orion capsule left distant lunar orbit at 22:53 CET on 1 December and is on its return journey home. The spacecraft completed the distant retrograde departure burn, firing the European Service Module’s main engine for 105 seconds to set the spacecraft on course for a close lunar flyby as it returns to Earth.
@nasa
https://t.me/astronomy
