The Artemis I mission brought Orion on its closest approach to the moon and will take it farther away from the Earth than any other human-rated craft.
The power of the moon's gravity along with a thruster on an outbound powered burn allowed the craft to come within 81 miles of the moon. It will be close to the moon over the next week.
The distance away from Earth traveled by Apollo 13 was about 30 thousand miles.
NASA flight director Zeb Scoville said that this is one of those days when you have been thinking about and dreaming about something for a long time. We just saw the Earth set behind the moon as we prepare to bring humans back to the moon within a few years. This is a big deal.
The most powerful rocket to successfully launch from Earth into space with its 8.8 million pound of thrust was launched from Kennedy Space Center.
The new Artemis deep-space program was designed to travel to the moon and eventually to Mars, but due to the cancellation of NASA's former Constellation program, it was shifted to be the prime vehicle.
The mission will be on the moon for 25.5 days and will return to Earth on December 11.
It will take six days. The flyby started at 7:44 a.m. It's closest approach is around 7 o'clock.
After flying around the far side of the moon, Orion lost contact with NASA.
The OMS engine that flew on 19 missions of the Space Shuttle Program between 1984 and 2002 is the source of the 2-minute, 30-second burn. There are 33 engines in the service module, all from Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Artemis I is an uncrewed flight that is meant to show the capsule is safe. The heat shield will have to protect it from re-entry temperatures that can reach 5,000 degrees.
If successful, NASA can move forward with Artemis II, a crewed mission to the moon slated for no earlier than May 2024 and Artemis III, which will return humans, including the first woman, to the lunar surface no earlier than 25 years later.
Apollo 8 was the first NASA mission to go around the far side of the moon with four men.
The far side of the moon is not called the dark side by people on Earth. The far side of the moon was illuminated by the sun while we were in the air.
He and his crewmates were in awe for the first time.
He said that they had seen the far side. As they slowly passed us, we looked through a candy store window at the unnamed craters.
When Apollo 13 was not able to land on the moon, it flew out to a distance of more than 200,000 miles from Earth.
On the 11th day of the mission, the distance will be surpassed by the craft.
The paper was published in 2022
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