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So after After 15 Years, 1,000 Tests, Orion’s Heat Shield Ready to Take the Heat
After traveling beyond the Moon, nearly 270,000 miles from Earth, the capsule will work up a speed of 25,000 miles per hour. As it slams through Earth’s atmosphere, friction will cut that speed to just 300 miles per hour in a matter of minutes. The result is heat – and a lot of it.
A sample of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield material undergoes testing in the Laser-Enhanced Arc Jet Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley on April 19, 2021. Orion’s thermal protection materials underwent more than 1,000 arc jet tests, during which extremely hot and fast-moving gases passed over the test material, approximating the heating a spacecraft experiences when entering the atmosphere. The test results helped certify the heat shield for the Artemis I mission.
NASA's Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft aced moon mission despite heat shield issue
In a teleconference on Tuesday (March 7), NASA leadership discussed Orion's performance on the historic Artemis 1 mission that saw the spacecraft orbit the moon before returning to Earth after 25 days. Orion was carried to lunar orbit after launching on Nov. 16, 2022 atop the agency's Space Launch System rocket (SLS), the most powerful rocket ever launched.
During Tuesday's call, NASA program managers revealed that Orion's heat shield did not perform as expected, losing more material than the agency had planned for. Nevertheless, NASA leadership is confident that everything will be ready for the crewed around-the-moon flight of Artemis 2, which is planned for next year.
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