‘Day One Of The Mars Era:’ Orion Splashes Down 600 Miles From San Diego
The Orion spacecraft has splashed down and is now being taken to Naval Base San Diego on board the warship Anchorage. NASA has invited news media to photograph the Orion capsule starting Monday.
As previously reported by the Inquisitr, the Orion spacecraft is the next step in NASA’s effort to send human astronauts into deep space and maybe one day to Mars. Using Orion, NASA also hopes to recover its own independence, no longer depending on other countries’ space agencies for human space travel.
The Orion has successfully completed its two-orbit mission around the Earth, and landed in the Pacific ocean, roughly 600 miles away from San Diego.
According to ABC News Denver, Orion reached an altitude of 3,604 miles. That’s about 14 times higher than the international space station, and the furthest from the Earth a spacecraft intended for human astronauts has gone since the Apollo missions.
Now, according to UT San Diego, the Navy, working out of San Diego, is doing its part to support the mission, a long tradition according to Francis French, director of education at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park.
“The Apollo spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific and were brought to San Diego — mostly North Island — by the Navy. So this continues a tradition that goes back to the early days of the space program. The Navy has always been a huge part of supporting NASA’s splash down operations.”
Despite travelling at over 20,000 mph and enduring extreme temperatures reaching 4,000 degrees, Orion managed to reduce its speed to just 20 mph in 11 minutes and land just one mile away from its intended bullseye.
After flight @USNavy divers from @ussanchorage work with @NASA_go4launch team to recover #Orion pic.twitter.com/oxsBwJmGwC
— Orion Spacecraft (@NASA_Orion) December 7, 2014
While photographers get their chance to see the Orion up close, NASA scientists will be proceeding to the next step to sort through the large amount of data collected from the spacecraft during its mission, a process that’s expected to take months.
Despite the success of the mission, scientists aren’t expecting anyone to actually ride in the Orion until 2021. The next big milestone comes in 2017, when NASA will use the same Orion capsule currently on its way to San Diego for a launch abort test. Then, the next year, a second Orion will make its way into space on board the SLS megarocket currently under development.
It may be a long ways to go from the splash down near San Diego to the final launch to Mars, but this mission is still major progress, as NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. called it “Day One of the Mars era.”
[Image Credit: NASA/Twitter]
