Dec. 5 (UPI) — NASA on Monday will broadcast live footage of the Orion spacecraft performing a close flyby of the Moon on Day 20 of the Artemis I mission as the capsule prepares to return to Earth.
The livestream will begin at 9 a.m. EST and Orion is scheduled to perform the return powered flyby burn around 11:43 a.m., NASA said in a statement.
The maneuver will mark the closest approach of the Orion spacecraft to the Moon to date, flying 79.2 miles above the lunar surface, and is the last major burn of the mission.
The burn is expected to last about 3 minutes and 27 seconds and the spacecraft will temporarily lose communication with Earth for about 31 minutes as it flies behind the dark side of the Moon.
Officials with NASA are scheduled to discuss the results of the burn around 5 p.m. EST, which will also be broadcast live. NASA leaders will also discuss the deployment of recovery assets to sea ahead of Orion’s splashdown on Dec. 11.
Last Thursday, the Orion capsule successfully completed a burn to take it out of distant retrograde orbit that lasted for 1 minute, 45 seconds.
The procedure involved firing engines on the European service module, which committed the spacecraft to leaving the lunar orbit.
Orion had been in distant retrograde orbit — an elliptical orbit around the moon that is unique to Artemis 1 to test its various systems.
The capsule had performed two other burns previously to prepare it for the distant retrograde orbit –taking it from 81 miles above the lunar surface on Nov. 21 to a lunar altitude of 40,000 miles.
The mission, which launched from Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 16, sets the stage for astronauts to return to the moon for the first time since 1972, which will occur sometime in 2025 or 2026.
The maneuver Monday comes eight years to the day after NASA first test launched the Orion spacecraft.
