NASA’s Artemis I unmanned mission Orion spacecraft has entered the Moon’s gravitational field as planned, five days following its release.
The mission, the first in NASA’s program to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon, entered the lunar sphere of influence at 19:09 UTC on November 20, making the Moon, rather than Earth, the main gravitational force acting on the spacecraft.
Subsequently, the craft carried out the so-called fourth departure trajectory correction burn before the departure powered flyby burn. Flight controllers conducted the powered-out flyby by firing the orbital maneuvering system engine for 2 minutes and 30 seconds to accelerate the spacecraft, Harness the pull of the Moon’s gravity and direct it into a distant retrograde orbit beyond the Moon.
The powered-out flyby ignition is the first of a pair of maneuvers required to enter a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon.
On his Twitter account, Jim Free, associate administrator for NASA exploration systems development, confirmed on November 21 the ongoing development of these maneuvers according to the planned plan.
For their part, flight controllers in the White Flight Control Room at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston captured Additional images of the Moon using the Optical Navigation Camera. The collection of images of the Earth and the Moon in different phases and distances will provide an improved set of data to certify its effectiveness as an aid in determining the location of future missions in changing lighting conditions.
As explained by NASA, mission managers currently have two active anomaly resolution teams. Anomaly resolution teams are a standard part of mission management by bringing together a team of technical experts to focus on a specific problem by examining data to understand the implications on a particular system.
Activating a separate team for this job allows engineers and flight controllers continue to focus on commanding and monitoring the spacecraft and evaluating flight test progress.
A team is currently analyzing the star tracking system to understand a number of flaws in random access memorywhich have been successfully recovered with power cycles.
A second team is looking at some cases where one of the eight units located in the service module that provides solar panel power to the crew module, called the power distribution and conditioning unit umbilical latching current limiter, opened without a command. The umbilical closed successfully each time and there was no loss of power flowing to the avionics in the spacecraft.
Both systems are currently operating as required and there are no mission impacts related to these efforts.. Analyzing the data from these systems and understanding their behavior during an active flight test while the hardware is in the deep space environment will improve mission operations on Artemis I and future missions.
