NASA’s Artemis II mission is almost at an end. The astronauts onboard the mission’s Orion crew capsule—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen—are on day eight of their 10-day trip around the moon and back. And now all eyes are on the plan for reentry.
“After an exciting day of science on Monday and a day for the crew to recover..., the team is turning our attention to the return and getting the crew safely home,” said Lakiesha Hawkins, acting deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, at a press conference on Wednesday.
The crew was scheduled to have another opportunity to practice manually steering the craft, which Hawkins said would be essential to validating Orion’s ability to dock with other spacecraft during future missions. Houston Ground Control, however, decided to cancel this mission and one of the day’s other planned activities—constructing a shelter from radiation using the capsule’s storage space. That gives more time to prepare the cabin for the return to Earth, according to mission flight director Rick Henfling.
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Friday’s splashdown will last just 13 minutes from reentry into Earth’s upper atmosphere to landing in the Pacific Ocean. As the capsule falls, it will deploy its thrusters to act as brakes, as well as several sets of parachutes—called drogues, pilots and main chutes—to slow it down from 34,965 feet per second (about 23,840 miles per hour) to around 20 miles per hour before it hits the water.
Landing and recovery director Liliana Villarreal called in to the briefing from onboard the USS John P. Murtha, a Navy vessel that is en route to meet Orion when it lands. Divers will disembark from the ship and approach the capsule to retrieve the astronauts and help them onto an inflated craft that she called the “front porch.”
After the day’s activities are done—including an evening news event with media—the crew’s attention will also be firmly on the critical final chapter of the mission. On Thursday the astronauts will practice activating several of the key systems for reentry and will make sure everything is working as planned.
The mission’s success so far has only firmed up NASA’s reentry plan, Henfling said: “We really have had a really well-functioning spacecraft.”
“We’re planning for a nominal entry, with procedures just as we had developed them preflight,” he added.
Still, Hawkins emphasized that Artemis II remains a test flight, and NASA still has much to learn as Orion makes its way back toward our planet. “When the mission goes well, it can look like flying to the moon is easy. It certainly is not,” Hawkins said. “We can’t forget that this is a test flight, and [we] are taking everything that we’re learning forward to support the next mission.”