Vlog 14: Over 1,000,000 kilometres in nearly 10 days

Uploaded on December 12, 2024

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Vlog 14: Over 1,000,000 kilometres in nearly 10 days

From Florida to California via… the Moon! In their campervan-size Orion capsule atop the SLS rocket, CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen and his Artemis II crewmates will launch from Florida. They will orbit Earth twice before making their way to the Moon at 39 times the speed of sound. After the lunar flyby, Orion will use the Moon's gravity to return to Earth. They will then splash down on the coast of San Diego. Watch this vlog to hear Jeremy explain the Artemis II trajectory. (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA, Fulwell 73 UK Limited)

Jeremy Hansen: We will fire this engine to accelerate to 39 times the speed of sound and head out to the Moon.

Title on screen: Artemis II trajectory

Jeremy Hansen : All right. Let's talk about the Artemis II trajectory. So, for our mission we’ll launch on the SLS rocket. None of this is to scale, by the way.

So, this is an enormous rocket. It’ll launch out of Florida. About two minutes into the flight, these solid rocket boosters will run out of fuel, they’ll detach, and then just the orange part of the rocket, plus us up top in this white part, will be heading to space.

After about that 8-to-9-minute journey to space, we'll just have from about here up on the rocket left, and we'll be in an orbit that takes about an hour and a half to go around Earth. So during that hour and a half, we can do things like extend the solar arrays, make sure we're still holding pressure, and just do some preliminary checks on the vehicle and make sure we're ready for another day in space, because after that hour and a half, we're going to light the engine that's inside this orange part of the rocket and accelerate to take us all the way out on this really highly elliptical orbit to 60,000 km away from Earth, and then all the way back to 200 km on the other side of the planet.

And that will take a day to do that. And during that day, we will, first thing we'll do is we'll get off the orange part of this rocket and just be the service module and the capsule left.

We'll actually use the upper part of the rocket as a target to do some rendezvous testing and some manual flight control testing. Once we're done with that, we'll move away from the rocket, and then we'll actually get some sleep and do some in-depth checks of the vehicle prior to coming back to 200 km above the surface, where we will fire this engine to accelerate to 39 times the speed of sound and head out to the Moon.

Now when we get to the Moon, the exact distance from the Moon is yet to be determined. It depends on where the Moon is relative to the Earth, because that changes. It's not a perfectly circular orbit. But just for argument's sake, we'll pass about 15,000 km beyond the far side of the Moon.

When we do that, we'll lose contact with Earth. Then we'll come back out again, we'll be able to see Earth, and we'll set our sights on coming home.

When we get back to Earth, we'll be going 39 times the speed of sound, and we have to get rid of all of that energy that this rocket gave us.

First thing we do is we get off of the service module, just the capsule, we hit Earth's atmosphere, we use our heat shield and the friction of the Earth's atmosphere to bleed off a lot of that energy. And then as we get down into the thicker parts of the atmosphere, then drogue chutes start coming out, then three main chutes, and that'll slow us down for a safe landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.

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