Slashdot Mirror
NASA's Orion Capsule Reaches Orbit
PaisteUser sends word that NASA's Orion capsule successfully reached orbit this morning after a flawless launch atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket. Video of the launch is available on YouTube, and the Orion Mission blog has frequent updates as mission milestones are reached.
Mission managers said the rocket and capsule performed perfectly during the initial phases of the test. "It was just a blast to see how well the rocket did," said Mark Geyer, NASA's Orion program manager. After Orion makes its first circuit around the planet, the rocket's upper stage will kick it into a second, highly eccentric orbit that loops as far as 3,600 miles from Earth. Then Orion will come screaming back into Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 20,000 mph — 80 percent of the velocity that a spacecraft returning from the moon would experience. This particular Orion is missing a lot of the components that would be needed for a crewed flight, and it won't be carrying humans. Instead, it's outfitted with more than 1,200 sensors to monitor how its communication and control systems deal with heightened radiation levels, how its heat shield handles re-entry temperatures that are expected to rise as high as 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and how its parachutes slow the craft down for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
The capabilities of the rocket.
To be pedantic: the rocket's capabilities were known, but the capsule's capabilities (heat shield, rad shielding, chutes, etc) needed testing. Large, complex systems on whose function lives will depend should be checked and tested in at least one realistic run before crews are committed to them.
This is the "trial by fire" they need to see if you can leave earth orbit in the Orion capsule. They're taking it out on a long burn to pass through the inner Van Allen belt which ought to give them all the info they need on radiation exposure and its effects on the capsule's systems. Then they get to find out how well the heat shield holds up on re-entry (at that speed the shield should reach 4000 degrees F).
All of this is also completely automated, which is a bonus feature for safety reasons if the crew ever gets incapacitated.
Most of the command module avionics, control system, fore and aft heat shield, power and thermal subsystem, and recovery systems like the parachute system.
Quite a few things, actually,
Here is a blog reporting lift to the second orbit: http://space.io9.com/will-orio...
They are making sure that their spacecraft actually works before putting people in it. Not that hard to suss out.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.