NASA's Artemis One Orion spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the moon. The next phase of the mission will include an engine burn that will propel the spacecraft into what's called a retrograde orbit, which means it'll be revolving in the opposite direction of the moon's natural rotation. Now, the program hit a snag Wednesday when NASA lost contact with the Orion capsule for a nail biting 47 minutes. Scientists had no way of contacting the spacecraft. After finally reestablishing communications, it's still unclear why it cut out in the first place.
Space craft captures pictures of Artemis 1
Check out these images from Artemis one. The spacecraft captured these yesterday of the moon. During its closest approach, The ship has been capturing images of the earth and moon in different phases to aid a spacecraft orientation during future crewed missions. Artemis One is scheduled to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast on December 11th.
CBS News space consultant Bill Harwood
Well, absolutely. And first of all, happy Thanksgiving to everyone up there and in New York and across the country. You know, the art of this mission. The goal here is to test techniques and procedures and the spacecraft that NASA wants to use to resume human exploration of the moon. So the spacecraft is unpiloted. There's no one on board, but they want to operate it in deep space so they can really put it through the wringer and make sure they understand how the propulsion systems, communications, life support systems, all of that will work in the actual environment astronauts will face when they return to the moon. There's a rocket firing today that's going to, as you say, put the spacecraft in lunar orbit. You know, it's interesting. You might have thought it was already there. You know, they flew by the moon on Monday, made a close approach with rocket firing. But this one today is the one that actually puts them in what they call a distant retrograde orbit. That's where they want to be for the next week and a half or so to test Orion systems. And once that burn is complete, it will well and truly be on a trajectory carrying it farther from the Earth than any other spacecraft designed to carry humans. And that record will be exceeded later today. That was set by Apollo 13, way back during the Apollo moon program. They'll go past that mark today and eventually reach a point even further before they head back in and return to Earth.
