The crew is in the final hours of their mission, which will end Friday evening East Coast time, right around midnight UTC. From the running series of posts on Space.com:
Orion will begin its plunge through the atmosphere on Friday (April 10) at around 7:53 p.m. EDT (2353 GMT), entering a 6-minute communications blackout. The spacecraft's two parachute groups, its drogues and the main chutes, will deploy around 8:03 p.m. EDT (0003 GMT, April 11) and 8:04 p.m. EDT (0004 GMT, April 11), respectively, with splashdown expected at 8:07 p.m. EDT (0007 GMT, April 11).
Like everyone who has been on such a historic mission, they haven't really had everything they've been through sink in to their heads. Buzz Aldrin famously went through this after Apollo 11 and being the second person to step on the moon in human history. After something that big, how do you return to an ordinary life?
"I wanted to resume my duties, but there were no duties to resume," Aldrin said in his book. "There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into."
Tomorrow brings a big test that I think many of us have been fearing.
I think all of you who follow the space program know about the heat shield issues that Artemis 1 had, with holes essentially scattered around the entire heat shield. This has been tested about as well as it could be tested without a "disposable" Artemis mission throwing away an SLS booster to get an Orion capsule on the intended trajectory at the right speed so it could be tested under the worst case conditions. The results were approved by NASA Chief Jared Isaacman just three months ago.
The Orion heat shield as seen after the Artemis I flight. Credit: NASA
There has been mention in a couple of places of a task for this mission of putting instruments in positions that can track the Orion capsule during reentry to capture images of it. It might reveal details about the reentry that other instruments can't or won't.
Reentry is always a scary time in a mission. Some reentries are scarier than other. Godspeed, Artemis 2!
uhhh 'We're in the final 24 hours of Artemis 2'
ReplyDelete- you realize that may not have been the best phrasing given the content of the post...
Well, from that perspective, every minute after launch could have been "the final 24 hours of Artemis 2" but this day adds that the final hours don't need to be a bad thing.
DeleteI believe today is the anniversary of the Titanic's departure. I wonder if that has occurred to the crew.
ReplyDeleteIf that wasn't the perfect mission, with a to the minute schedule, I don't know what is.
ReplyDeleteIf they can build on that success, and clean up the financials going forward, they just might have a chance building that base. "On Schedule" well....that's another thing entirely. (and the thrill is still there, watching it happen in real time)