Artemis II Crew Faces Most Dangerous Phase of Mission in Final Minutes

NASA’s Artemis II mission is about to enter its most dangerous stage — a high-temperature plunge through Earth’s atmosphere with no communication — before a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.The crew’s Orion spacecraft is scheduled to hit the waters off of San Diego just after 5 p.m. local time on Friday, the 10th day of the mission.“We are good to go,” the mission vehicle manager, Branelle Rodriguez, said at a Thursday afternoon update from Johnson Space Center at Houston.The crew will be traveling nearly 25,000 miles per hour when the craft reenters the atmosphere. “They’re coming home pretty fast,” the mission’s lead flight director, Jeff Radigan, said.During re-entry, the service module will separate about 20 minutes before Orion reaches the upper atmosphere southeast of Hawaii. If needed, a final trajectory‑adjustment burn will fine-tune the flight path before the spacecraft begins a series of roll maneuvers to safely distance itself from hardware the crew will release from the capsule. Orion will enter a planned six‑minute communications blackout during the descent as plasma forms around the capsule during peak heating.After emerging from blackout, Orion will jettison its forward bay cover and deploy drogue parachutes — small parachutes designed to stabilize the capsule — near 22,000 feet, and then unfurl its three main parachutes at around 6,000 feet to slow the capsule for splashdown.NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, spent Thursday preparing for their return, including reviewing reentry and splashdown procedures and conducting two return trajectory correction burns.There are lingering concerns about the heat shields on the spacecraft because of damage suffered during the 2022 Artemis I test flight. NASA has changed the planned trajectory of the spacecraft for reentry for this mission to lessen the time it faces extreme heat.The new entry method is untested in a live environment but NASA says it is confident after using computer modeling.“We have high confidence,” NASA’s associate administrator, Amit Kshatriya, said of the heat shields at Thursday’s update. Mr. Kshatriya added that the astronauts were part of the team that created the new reentry plan and are fully aware of what it entails.Within two hours after splashdown, the crew will be pulled from Orion and flown to the USS John P. Murtha for post‑mission medical evaluations before returning to Johnson Space Center.Artemis II is NASA’s first manned return to the moon in more than 50 years. The Artemis program aims to send astronauts back to the surface in two years. NASA plans unmanned missions in advance of the astronauts to position supplies for construction of a permanent base near the moon’s south pole.The NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, said systems are already being built and tested for future missions as the current space flight is underway.

Artemis II Crew Faces Most Dangerous Phase of Mission in Final Minutes

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