NASA unexpectedly lost contact with the moon-bound Orion capsule early Wednesday morning (November 23).
Unmanned ones Orion has been performing well since ends towards the moon last Wednesday (November 16) at NASA Artemis 1 mission. But this Wednesday (Nov. 23) brought news: At 1:09 a.m. EST (0609 GMT), mission controllers lost contact with Orion while they were reconfiguring communication between capsule and capsule. Deep Space NetworkA set of radio dishes used by NASA to talk to distant spacecraft.
“The reconfiguration has been successfully performed several times over the past few days, and the team is investigating the cause of the signal loss,” NASA officials wrote. quick update on wednesday (opens in new tab)🇧🇷
“The team resolved the issue with an on-the-ground reconfiguration,” they said. “Engineers are reviewing data from the incident to help determine what happened, and the team and data processing officer will downlink the data recorded on the Orion during the outage to feed into this assessment.”
Related: NASA’s Artemis 1 lunar mission: Live updates
More: 10 wild facts about the Artemis 1 mission
The blackout lasted 47 minutes, and Orion emerged from it in good condition; NASA officials said the spacecraft was healthy and had no apparent ill effects.
Orion is preparing for an important maneuver: On Friday (November 25), the engine that will put the capsule into lunar orbit is scheduled to burn. If all goes well, Orion will remain in this orbit for about a week before heading back to Earth in December. 1.
The capsule will arrive here in December by parachuting into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. 11.
Artemis 1 is the launch vehicle for Orion and NASA’s Giant Space launch systemthe the most powerful rocket always fly successfully. The duo will first fly astronauts aboard Artemis 2, which will send a crewed Orion around the moon in 2024.
Artemis 3, in a year or so, will land astronauts on the moon’s south pole — where NASA aims to establish a manned outpost, one of its main goals. Artemis program🇧🇷
Mike Wall is the author of “There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter. @michaeldwall (opens in new tab)🇧🇷 Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab)🇧🇷
