Everything is ready to recover Integrity after the Splashdown scheduled for the Italian night between 10 and 11 April. For years no NASA undertaking had been so followed: the Agency’s website now has 197 million followers, 150 more than before the launch
The exact geographical position where the splashdown of the Orion Integrity spacecraft will take place is not yet known, while the time is almost defined. These data, in fact, will continue to vary based on what happens in the final stages of the flight, starting however with some route adjustments that were necessary during the route between the Moon and Earth. During the mission Integrity lost mass: the fuel used and therefore expelled in the form of energy and the discharge of urine (about 45kg), inevitably cause differences between NASA’s preventive calculations and the position detections carried out continuously. Whatever happens, at the time of writing, the landing of the Artemis 2 mission is expected in a radius of a few tens of miles off the coast of San Diego around 3 in the morning Italian time on April 11th, or in the late afternoon of Friday April 10th US west coast time. The Orion capsule will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere while its service module, responsible for propulsion and maneuverability of the vehicle in space, will separate and disintegrate. This maneuver will expose the crew module’s heat shield, protecting astronauts from the temperatures of around 1,650 degrees Celsius that the vehicle will endure. Orion will then perform a parachute-controlled ditching. The capsule is scheduled to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on Friday, April 10, around 8:07 PM ET (Eastern Time), for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California. In those parts the Navy ship USS John P. Murtha is crossing paths, a unit, the tenth of the San Antonio Class, equipped with an amphibious bridge and helicopter pad and stationed in nearby San Diego. And these will be the ones to take off to recover Integrity. Once on board, the astronauts will undergo post-mission medical checks in the ship’s infirmary before returning to land to board a NASA aircraft bound for the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Subsequently, post-mission work will begin with the analysis of the results collected by the crew and relating to the tests carried out on the life support systems, propulsion, electrical power supply, thermal regulation and navigation data. Even if the mission seems to be heading towards success, nothing has been hidden regarding the malfunctions that occurred, from the Outlook connection which inhibited e-mail to the well-known problems with the on-board toilet. This will be a mission remembered for being the first of the new lunar missions to have been able to produce an enormous quantity of photographs and videos. During the last press conference broadcast during the flight, the Artemis 2 crew said they had “many more photos and many more stories” to share with the world. The mission’s pilot, Victor Glover, said the crew can’t wait to show the world what they’ve seen. Glover said: “We have to come back. There’s a lot of data that you’ve already seen, but all the great things will come back with us; meanwhile we still have time before we can start to process what we’ve experienced. But it’s going to be something I’ll talk about for the rest of my life.” At the conference, the Los Angeles Times correspondent asked the astronauts how they experienced the 40 minutes of profound solitude during which contact with Earth was impossible, a question to which Commander Reid Wiseman responded: “We had a lot of scientific work to do and the most important lunar observations for geologists to make; but then we took a moment to share the maple biscuits brought by Jeremy Hansen (one of the two mission specialists, ed.), and we took about three or four minutes to think deeply about where we were.” For his colleague Victor Glover (the pilot), the “greatest gift” was seeing the lunar eclipse from the far side of the Moon, while for Commander Wiseman, the highlight was when his crew named a lunar crater after his wife Carroll, who passed away in 2020. Mission specialist Kristina Cock, asked by BBC News what she will miss and what she didn’t like, replied: “I will miss the ability to work as a team; we can’t explore space more deeply if we don’t do something uncomfortable, if we don’t make some sacrifices and if we don’t take some risks. And all of these things are worth doing.” Meanwhile, it’s Artemis infodemic: NASA’s social channels are close to 200 million followers, 150 of which arrived during this mission. Telemetry at the time of writing: 12 hours until next course correction; speed 6,012 km/h increasing, distance to cover 161,543 km.
