NASA Team Prepares for Orion Spacecraft’s Return off San Diego Coast – NBC 7 San
While Florida, Texas, and Pasadena, California, are often the epicenter of NASA’s space world here on Earth, San Diego will get its moment in the moonlight when the Orion spacecraft completes its final leg of the Artemis I Mission on Sunday.
Orion — the capsule that will one day transport America’s first woman and first person of color to the Lunar surface, and could ultimately take humans to Mars — made its final orbits around the moon on Monday and was beginning its prepensed pummel towards the Pacific Ocean.
The exact location of the splashdown has not yet been determined. But, if all goes to plan, Orion will drop into the sea about 50 miles off the coast of America’s Finest City Sunday afternoon.
The visual guide below outlines each phase of the Artemis I Mission. Click on phase three to see what is in store for Orion when it returns to Earth on Sunday. Learn more here.
A recovery team made up of NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) engineers and technicians and USS Portland Navy divers and sailors has been in San Diego since just after Thanksgiving to practice their role in what’s expected to be a gripping return.
The team practiced for three days off the coast to reel in a mock capsule and load it onto the Naval Base San Diego-homeported ship, which was selected for being an amphibious vessel with both a flight deck and what’s known as a well deck leading to the ocean.
“The mission that we’re doing is kind of amphibious in nature; it’s just… normally were recovering marine vehicles or hovercraft, instead of doing that, we’re just grabbing the orbital,” USS Portland Capt. John Ryan said.
Video of the practice shows more than a dozen Navy sailors aboard several boats meet with a mock Orion at sea. After rigging a series of cables and hooks to the vessel, a line known as the winch pulls Orion into a yellow cradle within the ship’s well deck. Water is then released back to sea and a secure Orion is transported to shore.
It sounds easy in theory, but any miscalculation, any bump to Orion could be detrimental to the capsule.
When it comes time to recover the real Orion, the entire process will take about six hours, enough time to also complete a series of tests and data collection critical for future missions. For example, the heat shield that will prevent Orion, and ultimately astronauts, from burning up when it breaks through Earth’s atmosphere at temperatures of 5,000 degrees must undergo about an hour-and-a-half of image data collecting before the recovery team can pull it aboard USS Portland.
“This mission is all about gathering data so the timeline for recovery will be about six hours,” NASA Landing and Recovery coordinator Melissa Jones said. “We capture a lot of that data for our flight test objectives; we’ll be very careful with the capsule. We are ready and honored as an integrated team to bring Orion home on the last leg of her journey.”
If Orion was manned, the recovery team would have only about two hours to get its astronauts to shore for medical evaluation.
“Everything we’re doing right now is really to learn how to go forward with crewed missions,” Jones added.
While the…
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