The NASA moon mission “Artemis 1” is on its way home. The unmanned “Orion” capsule started its engines on Thursday and swerved out of its lunar orbit, as the US space agency NASA announced.
On Monday, the capsule will fly close to the moon again on its test flight before returning to Earth on December 11.
The capsule swung into orbit about 50,000 miles from the moon about a week ago, then flew halfway. Because of the great distance, it took her about six days.
“Orion” flew around the moon in a direction opposite to that in which the moon revolves around the earth. According to NASA, this orbit had the advantage of being very stable and “Orion” using relatively little fuel on it.
After months of delays, the mission “Artemis 1” took off for a first test launch on November 16 (local time). The Orion capsule was launched with the Space Launch System rocket from the Cape Canaveral cosmodrome in the US state of Florida.
With the ‘Artemis’ program, named after the Greek goddess of the moon, American astronauts should land on the moon again in the coming years, including a woman and a non-white person for the first time. (sda/dpa)
Source: Blick
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