ORLANDO, Florida, April 2: The Orion spacecraft carrying four astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission blasted off Thursday to launch the crew on a lunar trajectory, setting them the furthest humans have ever traveled in space.
A successful launch maneuver put the crew on track to enter the moon’s magnetic field on Sunday morning, as they prepare to surpass the space record set by Apollo 13 in 1970.
“We’re getting a good view of the dark side of the moon-lit Earth right now. It’s amazing,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen told mission control about 10 minutes after launch.
Since they started 26 hours earlier from Florida, the astronauts spent their first day with space exploration cameras, maneuvering their Orion spacecraft and dealing with minor toilet issues and email messages that were later corrected.
They were in a highly rotating orbit around the Earth, twisting them to a distance of 43,000 kilometers (64,000 km) in one direction and about 100 kilometers in the other, from where the lunar eclipse, known as the translunar injection burn, began.
The procedure, which began at 7:49 pm ET (2349 GMT), is an orbital exit that pushes them out of Earth’s orbit and into the lunar orbit. It is the last major operation of the mission, leaving the Orion capsule largely under the influence of orbital mechanics for the remainder of the mission.
Commander Reid Wiseman, who is testing cameras as the crew flies about 40,000 kilometers from Earth earlier Thursday, saw the planet as a shrinking sun, and said taking pictures from that distance makes it difficult to change exposure conditions.
“It’s like going back to your house, trying to take a picture of the moon. That’s what it feels like now when you’re trying to take a picture of Earth,” he told mission control in Houston as he photographed his home planet with an iPhone.
Wiseman earlier faced a slight technical problem when his first attempts to use Microsoft Outlook to check emails failed, but that was quickly remedied with the help of mission control.
PHOTOGRAPHERS USING GOPROS AND IPHONES TO TRANSFORM THE TOUR
The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission, which launched from Florida on Wednesday, have several different instruments on board to take pictures of space in their Orion capsule throughout the flight.
They include small GoPro action cameras and iPhones, as well as professional Nikon cameras that have been used by NASA astronauts on the International Space Station for years.
The decision to equip crews with iPhones was made under NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, a billionaire astronaut who flew on two independent SpaceX Dragon missions and used the devices during his flights, NASA officials said.
NASA has not released any images taken by the crew so far, but expects to do so later in the mission after some critical moments. Among them is the much-anticipated “Earthrise” image, which resembles the famous photo taken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders in 1968 as his spacecraft orbited the moon.
On the sixth day, astronomers are expected to reach about 252,000 kilometers from Earth, the farthest distance ever flown by humans, when the planet will appear no bigger than a basketball on the far side of the moon.
USE SOMETHING
Shortly after the successful launch, astronaut Christina Koch alerted mission control in Houston to a flashing red light indicating a problem with Orion’s cabin, which sits in a small room inside the crew cabin, itself slightly larger than the interior of a small van. The mission’s engineers applied the fix after a near-miss performance test, NASA said.
Space toilets are often not easy to use but are useful for long-duration missions, with very different designs.
On the ISS and Orion, astronauts use the $24 million Universal Waste Management System, which uses a liquid to collect waste, returns urine to water and seals solid waste in bags that end up on the jet.
The toilet has a specially shaped funnel and hose for urine and a stool. The fan and the chair can be used at the same time, to show ideas from female astronauts, NASA’s website shows.
In contrast, astronauts on the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s used rudimentary pouches attached to their bodies, stored in compartments inside the spacecraft, or left on the moon.
The Orion toilet is very similar to the standard design and is protected by a small door in another room.
It’s “the one place we can go during a mission where we can feel like we’re alone for a second,” Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency said in a video last year.
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