NASA’s Orion space capsule continues its maiden flight after setting a personal
record. The spacecraft was built and managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The capsule reached its farthest distance from Earth over the weekend at nearly three hundred thousand miles. That broke the record for a spacecraft designed to carry people, which was set by Apollo 13 back in 1970. NASA’s Orion manager Jim Jeffreys says the capsule is checking out fine, including the power systems.
“There are four solar arrays on board Orion, each are about four meters long,” said Jeffries. “And one thing we’ve learned from the mission is that we’re collecting more power than we expected. Altogether, we already have over thirteen kilowatts of power that can power equipment on board.”
The current Artemis 1 mission is to test the Alabama built rocket designed to carry astronauts back to the Moon, and perhaps onto Mars. The Orion capsule is also being tested. That includes measurements of what crewmembers will experience on manned flights. Jeffreys says the unmanned capsule has mannequins*on board with sensors to help the agency know what actual astronauts will feel when they climb aboard.
“So, we have several radiation experiments on board. We have been able to collect data from a few of those. But, with respect to the mannequins, that data is being collected and it will be analyzed after the mission,” he said.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is managing both the Orion capsule and the Artemis moon rocket that carried it to orbit.
