Artemis 2 astronauts head for the moon after make-or-break engine burn (video)

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Artemis 2 is on its way to the Moon.

The mission Orion capsule successful a crucial translunar injection (TLI) burns tonight (April 2), igniting its main engine to leave Earth orbit and head towards the natural satellite of our planet.

This was an important step for the Artemis 2 mission, and one of his crew members marked it with a few poignant words.

“With this successful TLI, the crew feels pretty good here on the way to the moonand we just wanted to let everyone on the planet who worked to make Artemis possible know that we strongly felt the power of your perseverance through every second of this burn,” said Artemis 2 astronaut Jeremy Hansen, from Canadian Space Agencysaid just after the maneuver.

“Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of, and it is your hopes for the future that now carry us on this journey around the Moon,” he added.

Artemis 2 launched Wednesday evening (April 1) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending four astronauts into the air for the first-ever crewed flight of Orion and its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The duo had flown together only once before, on an uncrewed flight. Artemis 1 mission to lunar orbit in 2022.

Orion and its occupants – NASA’s Hansen and Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch – remained in Earth’s orbit for more than 24 hours, checking out the capsule’s various systems before its planned plunge into deep space.

This afternoon, the Artemis 2 mission management team declared the spacecraft fit for this giant leap, giving the green light for the TLI burn. So, starting at 7:49 p.m. EDT (11:49 p.m. GMT), Orion fired its main engine for five minutes and 50 seconds, putting it on a trajectory to circle the Moon and then return to Earth – without the need for any other major maneuvers.

“Our TLI burn, the burn that gets us to go to the Moon, is also our deorbit burn,” Koch said in a NASA interview before the launch. “As soon as we made that decision, we pretty much bought the rest of the mission.”

The TLI fire used Orion’s main orbital maneuvering engine, which was salvaged from NASA’s spacecraft. space shuttle program and upgraded for an Artemis trip to the moon. The engine has already flown into space 19 times aboard three different space shuttles. If you attached it to a car, it would accelerate you from zero to 60 mph in 2.7 seconds.

(Orion has three primary methods of propulsion: its main engine and a set of eight smaller auxiliary engines, which are on its European Service Module, as well as a set of reaction control thrusters on the capsule itself.)

Artemis 2 is now on track to become the first crewed mission to visit the Moon since Apollo 17who landed on the lunar surface in December 1972. Koch is the first woman to leave low earth orbitand Glover and Hansen are respectively the first person of color and first non-American to do so. (THE Apollo the astronauts were all white men.)

Orion will circle the Moon on the sixth day of the mission, approximately five days, one hour and 30 minutes after liftoff. The Artemis 2 quartet will set another record in the process, moving away from Earth like no humans have ever done before. They will exceed the mark set by the Apollo 13 astronauts, who traveled a maximum of 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from our planet after experiencing an in-flight anomaly that derailed their moon landing plans.

Artemis 2 will return home on mission day 10 and crash into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. The full success of this test mission will help pave the way for Artemis Programthe first crewed moon landing, on Artemis 4 in 2028, and the construction of a lunar base a few years later, if all goes as planned.