NASA unexpectedly lost contact with its moon-bound Orion capsule early Wednesday morning (November 23), for reasons that remain unclear.
the unmanned Orion has performed well ever since launching to the moon last Wednesday (November 16) at NASA artemis 1 mission But this Wednesday (November 23) a problem occurred: mission controllers lost communication with Orion at 1:09 am EST (0609 GMT) while reconfiguring a link between the capsule and the deep space networkthe set of radio antennas that NASA uses to talk to its distant spacecraft.
“The reconfiguration has been carried out successfully several times in the last few days and the team is investigating the cause of the signal loss,” NASA officials wrote in a statement. Brief update on Wednesday (opens in a new tab).
“The team solved the problem with a reconfiguration on the land side,” they added. “Engineers are examining the event data to help determine what happened, and the command and data officer will download the data recorded onboard Orion during the outage for inclusion in that assessment.”
Related: NASA’s Artemis 1 Moon Mission: Live Updates
Plus: 10 Wild Facts About The Artemis 1 Lunar Mission
The communication cut lasted 47 minutes and Orion went well; the spacecraft is healthy and suffered no apparent ill effects, NASA officials said.
Orion is preparing for a crucial maneuver: It’s scheduled to perform an engine burn on Friday (November 25) that will insert the capsule into orbit around the moon. If all goes well, Orion will stay in that orbit for about a week, then return to Earth on December 1. 1.
The capsule will arrive here with a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast on December 1. eleven
Artemis 1 is a revolutionary cruise ship for Orion and the giant NASA space launch systemthe most powerful rocket never to fly successfully. The duo is scheduled to fly astronauts for the first time in 2024 on Artemis 2, which will send a crewed Orion around the moon.
Artemis 3 will follow about a year later, landing astronauts near the moon’s south pole, the site where NASA intends to build a manned outpost, one of the primary goals of its artemis program.
Mike Wall is the author of “out there (opens in a new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; Illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @migueldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Espaciodotcom (opens in a new tab) either Facebook (opens in a new tab).
