Artemis I splashed down on Dec 11, 2022, 17:40:30 UTC west of Baja California after a 25-day uncrewed flight around the Moon. It performed a skip-reentry profile that spreads out the deceleration (g-loads) over a longer period by aerodynamically "bouncing off" the atmosphere during the initial reentry and then reentering a second time shortly after.
Reentry started at 17:20 UTC when the Orion capsule crossed the 400 kft altitude mark (also named Entry Interface) flying at near 40 000 km/h. Orion uses the PredGuid NPC algorithm to guide it through atmospheric reentry while managing heating, g-load, and fuel usage. Several banking maneuvers are used to steer the capsule to the correct splashdown location. The different phases of the algorithm are shown on the left side of the screen.
The Orion spacecraft uses spaceflight-hardened GoPro Hero 4 Black cameras to capture engineering videos. While these cameras provided spectacular views during the mission, most videos were also captured with the GoPro “SuperView” capture mode enabled which stretches the original 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9 nonuniformly, causing the horizon to appear warped. I have reverted this distortion using the “GoPro Reframe” plugin in DaVinci Resove. The video was also carefully upscaled to 4K, mainly to reduce video compression artefacts. Finally, the contrast and colors of the video were significantly enhanced, since a lot of soot was deposited on the window during reentry clouding the view.
The trajectory/telemetry data was was digitized from various plots published on ntrs.nasa.gov. It should therefore be interpreted with caution as digitized values may have significant errors, and synchronization may be off by several seconds.
Original video source: https://images.nasa.gov/details/art001m1203451716
Trajectory sources: [range, altitude – coverage ends before entry interface] NASA (2024), Artemis I Ephemeris, https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/orion/track-nasas-artemis-i-mission-in-real-time/
[altitude, range, speed, acceleration] Rea et. al. (2024), Orion Artemis I Entry Performance, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20240000024
[speed] Gualdoni et. al. (2023), Generation of the Artemis I Best Estimated Trajectory (BET), https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20230011245
[altitude, speed] NASA (2027), Orion’s parachute system, https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/orion_parachutes.pdf
by stimeon
1 Comment
Well, that was absolutely terrifying to watch!