Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Orion spacecraft enters distant retrograde orbit around the moon

By

NASA’s Orion spacecraft has entered orbit around the moon, marking the start of its week-long orbit as part of the Artemis I mission. The plan is for the uncrewed spacecraft to test out equipment and hardware ahead of planned crewed missions around and to the moon, named Artemis II and III, respectively. To get into this orbit, Orion performed an engine burn for around one and a half minutes on Friday, November 25.

Orion is in an orbit called a distant retrograde orbit, meaning it is 40,000 miles away from the moon and is moving around the moon in the opposite direction from how the moon moves around the Earth. This efficient orbit requires minimal fuel to maintain, and as this orbit is distant from the moon, the spacecraft will complete half an orbit around the moon in one week before heading back toward Earth.

View of the Moon seen from ESA's European Service Module that is powering NASA's Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back, on flight day nine of the Artemis I mission, on 24 November 2022.
View of the Moon seen from ESA’s European Service Module that is powering NASA’s Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back, on flight day nine of the Artemis I mission, on November 24, 2022. NASA

At some point today, Saturday, November 26, Orion will pass the record for the farther distance traveled by a spacecraft designed for humans, according to NASA. The record was set by the Apollo 13 spacecraft at 248,655 miles (400,171 km) from Earth, and Orion is expected to travel a total of 270,000 miles from Earth — a point it should reach on Monday.

Recommended Videos

In an update by the European Space Agency (ESA), which provided Orion’s service module, Philippe Deloo, manager for Orion Service Module Program at ESA, shared that the fuel efficiency of the spacecraft is better than expected.

Related

“The European Service Module is operating more fuel-efficiently than the Artemis mission designers had foreseen, and it produces more electrical power while consuming less — many things have impressed us on the module’s performance so far,” Deloo said. “Mission control is enjoying pushing Orion and the European Service Module to their limits. The years of planning, designing, and building to the highest specifications are paying off, the European Service Module is performing better than we could have ever expected, and we have lots of data to analyze and learn from to ensure we will be taking astronauts to the Moon in the safest and most efficient way possible.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
NASA picks a commercial partner to visit the far side of the moon
Rendering of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander delivering NASA’s LuSEE-Night radio telescope to the far side of the Moon.

NASA has big plans for the moon. From sending the first crewed mission to land on its surface in 50 years to setting up a space station in orbit, the agency has multiple missions planned for exploring our planet's satellite. These include partnerships with a number of private companies as well as NASA-developed projects, such as under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program which will contract out the transportation of small payloads to the moon.

This week, NASA announced it has selected the company Firefly Aerospace to develop a commercial lander for the far side of the moon. The lander, called Blue Ghost, will be used to deliver several NASA payloads to the moon, including a radio observation mission which is placed on the far side of the moon to minimize the radio noise coming from Earth. This natural radio quiet zone will let the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) telescope detect faint radio waves from an early period of the universe known as the cosmic dark ages.

Read more
NASA’s Lunar Flashlight satellite won’t make it to its planned orbit
This illustration shows NASA’s Lunar Flashlight carrying out a trajectory correction maneuver with the Moon and Earth in the background. Powered by the small satellite’s four thrusters, the maneuver is needed to reach lunar orbit.

This week has seen good news for one NASA moon mission, as the CAPSTONE satellite recovered from a communications issue, but bad news for another. The Lunar Flashlight mission, which is intended to search the south pole of the moon for water ice, now won't make it to its planned orbit.

This illustration shows NASA’s Lunar Flashlight carrying out a trajectory correction maneuver with the Moon and Earth in the background. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Read more
Astrophysicists propose cooling Earth by using Moon dust as ‘sunscreen’
Earth seen from space,

The world is no stranger to the perilous impact of global warming. Research courtesy of experts at the University of California, Irvine that was published last month warns of an oceanic disaster in the near future due to the current trajectory of climate change. Now, radical new research is proposing a rather odd solution to shield our planet from the Sun’s heat — moon dust.

The brainchild of experts at the University of Utah and the Center for Astrophysics (Harvard & Smithsonian), the idea is to launch dust collected from the moon into a stable orbit, allowing the dust cloud to block some of the sunlight. “Judiciously chosen trajectories allow streams of grains to shade Earth for up to a week,” says the research paper published in PLOS journal.

Read more