Artemis 1’s Orion spacecraft sees Earth rising above the moon
Earth rises above the shadowed moon like a blue beacon in a recently released video from NASA’s Artemis 1 mission.
The unmanned Orion spacecraft captured the images on Monday (Nov. 21), the same day it made a crucial engine combustion during a lunar flight. Orion had been launched into space five days earlier artemis 1NASA’s first flight Artemis program.
The two minute video shows Soil appear slowly behind the moon as Orion flies overhead. The moon is completely invisible in the shadows, making our planet seem to emerge from a black void.
The video was taken Monday at 8:05 a.m. EST (1305 GMT), about six minutes after Orion reconnected with NASA’s Deep Space Network of antennas after its lunar maneuver, agency officials said in a description with the video on YouTube (opens in new tab).
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The video footage was transmitted to Earth outside of a epic live broadcast which took place around that time, which focused on viewing our planet as a “light blue dotdeep in space in the minutes after Orion regained communication with Earth.
“You see Earth; you see home. You see yourself there in that image while Orion is 232,000 miles [373,000 kilometers] away from planet Earth,” NASA spokeswoman Sandra Jones said during live coverage of the Orion lunar flight on NASA Television.
Live viewers on Monday also saw Earth sink behind the moon in the moments before Orion lost communication, as expected, to perform its motor maneuver on the far side of the moon, which radio waves from our planet cannot reach.
The Artemis 1 mission will test the readiness of Orion and NASA’s massive Space Launch System rocket for future missions of the Artemis program, which will continue with the artemis 2 manned mission around the moon from 2024.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in new tab)(ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a space medicine book. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
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