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The blue dot under the solar sail: the earth.
Recorded on the 9th day of the »Artemis 1« flight
Photo:
NASA/AP/dpa
Around two weeks after the start of the "Artemis 1" moon mission, the unmanned "Orion" capsule has reached its furthest distance from Earth.
The capsule was around 432,194 kilometers from Earth in its orbit around the moon on Monday, the US space agency Nasa said at a press conference.
There has not yet been a further distance from Earth in the previous two weeks of the test mission - and that is not planned for the remaining two weeks either.
NASA boss Bill Nelson spoke of an "extraordinary success" of the mission so far.
"It's incredible how smoothly the mission has gone so far." The "Orion" capsule had already set a distance record on Saturday when it exceeded the mark of 249,000 miles (around 400,000 kilometers) from Earth.
According to NASA, this was the farthest distance ever traveled by a human-made spacecraft.
The previous record was set more than 50 years ago by the "Apollo 13" mission with 248,655 miles.
After months of postponements, the "Artemis 1" mission set off on a first test launch on November 16 (local time).
The Orion capsule was launched on the Space Launch System rocket from the Cape Canaveral cosmodrome in the US state of Florida.
The mission was halfway on Monday, the capsule is scheduled to leave the orbit around the moon on Thursday and land in the Pacific on December 11 after flying around two million kilometers.
There were still no astronauts on board, only radiation measurement dummies and a dummy.
But as early as 2024, an orbit of the moon with a human crew in an "Orion" capsule is to take place.
Landing on the moon is not planned until 2025, with the SpaceX spacecraft and astronauts on board, including for the first time a woman and a non-white person.
Humans could be living and working on the moon as early as this decade.
That's what Howard Hu, head of NASA's "Orion" program, promised in a BBC program.
Before 2030, according to Hu, people would definitely be working on the moon for a “longer period of time”, living in habitats and using rovers for locomotion – although it remains unclear which period of time Hu specifically meant.
ok/dpa
