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Has it been a year yet?
On December 11, 2022, NASA’s unused Orion spacecraft returned safely to Earth, bringing a successful conclusion to the historic Artemis 1-month mission.
That return was a fiery and spectacular one, as shown in the video from Orion: The box recorded its terrible fall in the Earth’s atmosphere, which left a trail of fire in the sky.
NASA released this amazing image on Monday (Dec. 11), send a one-minute photo to X (formerly known as Twitter) and links to the 25-minute full Orion re-entry video.
Target: NASA’s Artemis Program: Everything you need to know
Artemis 1 launched on Nov. 16, 2022, when the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket launched the unmanned Orion from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This is the first launch for the SLS, the most powerful rocket currently in use, and only the second for Orion. The package conducted a test flight to the world back in 2014, a trip that used a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket.
Artemis 1 Orion reached lunar orbit on Nov. 25, 2022 and stayed there for almost a week before starting the long journey back to Earth. On December 11, the object plunged into our planet’s dense atmosphere at about 24,500 mph (39,400 kph), posing a formidable challenge to its heat shield, the largest its type is built.
The heat shield passed the test, but not with flying colors.
“Some of the expectations that we’re expecting to come home from are different from what our computers predicted and what our soil tests predicted,” said Howard Hu, director of NASA’s Orion Program, during a call with reporters in March.
“So we had a lot more release of red material when we re-entered before we took off than we expected,” he added.
NASA is currently preparing for Artemis 2, the first crewed flight in the Artemis program. Like Artemis 1, it will use the SLS and Orion. The upcoming mission will send four astronauts – NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen – around the moon and back to Earth.
Artemis 2 is expected to be launched in 2024. It will be followed by Artemis 3, which will put astronauts on the moon in late 2025 or 2026, if according to the plan.
The overall Artemis plan calls for the establishment of a permanent man on and around the moon by the end of the 2020s. The skills and knowledge gained in achieving this goal will help people jump to Mars in the coming years, NASA officials said.