Orion snaps 'selfie' with the Moon as it prepares for distant retrograde orbit Nine days into its flight to the Moon and beyond, NASA's uncrewed Orion capsule is due to fire its engines for an insertion burn that will place the craft into a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) about 50,000km from the lunar surface. DRO provides a highly stable orbit requiring little fuel, allowing NASA to fully test Orion's …
"What are them horizontal lines on the moon's surface?"
Poor image alignment. I don't know what sort of camera the image is from but there are single line super high-resolution imagers that get used on space projects. It can be easier to make a single line of really high quality photosites rather than an entire 2D sensor that you would find in a DSLR. It's important for every pixel to register light in exactly the same way down to a whole bunch of decimal places.
Computers, of course, but remember Apollo astronauts having to constantly use the sextant to verify/determine position and orientation? Now we have a (poorly positioned) star tracker to do all that automatically (at least, when the thrusters aren't firing). And cameras. LOTS of cameras. Solar panels to (I assume) replace fuel cells (which may make a return as live astronauts need oxygen).
While I always got the sense that Apollo, though a huge effort, was just a tad bit *beyond* the bleeding edge of technology, Artemis seems to have used what we have learned since then to be more comfortably in the technological "sweet spot". Here's wishing NASA a successful mission and many more.
And even more important than knowing how they fail, is having access to hardened versions that are far less prone to the failures in the first place. One important failure mode is that inbound cosmic radiation can cause random state changes in circuits - and the smaller the circuits (c.f. modern CPUs using ever smaller feature sizes for higher speeds) the bigger the problem. So using older electronics with larger feature sizes, and encapsulated with a view to reducing such radiation impacts, means less risk of a random state change which could lead to failure.
"That's why they still use CPUs from the turn of the century, they know exactly how they work and more importantly how they fail."
There are a bunch of reasons why the electronics in spacecraft are very old designs. The interval between when the technical specs are locked down and when the hardware is finished building can be a decade. The CPU choice was limited due to a much smaller number being qualified "rad-hard" spec and those many have been 5yo designs to start with since not every evolution of CPU's will have a rad-hard version. The point brought up about die scale is also a consideration. Government programs are the worst since there is time wasted trying to get the project a budget allocated once it's been outlined and that budget being mauled every election cycle if it isn't canceled outright.
"Because cameras are CHEAP these days"
Cheap cameras are inexpensive, but good cameras are not. If you need to make critical measurements from an image, a GoPro is the last thing you would use. If you don't care about anything other than getting some sort of picture back, the price and availability can work in its favor. GoPros get used a lot because they are cheap and productions can destroy or risk destroying a few to capture some carnage close up and not worry as long as they can read the data from the memory card when they pry it out. Not something you'd do with a Panavision film camera.
"Computers, of course, but remember Apollo astronauts having to constantly use the sextant to verify/determine position and orientation?"
They "had to" as it was a task for the mission, not to be used to navigate the spacecraft normally. It's a good skill to have. I learned how to find myself and navigate with a topo map and compass way back in Boy Scouts. These days I use a SatNav when I'm driving and a handheld GPS receiver when I'm off the paved track but I still will have a map and a compass. They weight so little and stow in a tiny bit of space that they are worth brining along.
"Apollo astronauts having to constantly use the sextant"
They didn't HAVE to use it constantly. They chose to. Turned out the AGC was good enough to get the job done, and the "evil ruskies" didn't make an attempt to jam the signals from the ground controllers and their more powerful computers after all. Obviously, Apollo 13 made the belt & suspenders[0] approach make much more sense.
I remember Jim Lovell giving a talk about life in the Command Module (Stanford, late 1970s), allowing that the sextant was a good way to kill time during the long coast to and from the moon during Apollo 8 (these days no doubt they'll fondle one slab or another instead). He also commented that the long familiarity with the kit made using it in an emergency quite a bit easier in his later mission.
[0] That would be "belt & braces" to you Brits.
"Marvel movies aren't real"
Of course they aren't real. They are cheap, tawdry, plastic imitations of real movies.
Hollywood officially went TITSUP[0] with the release of TriStar's Godzilla in 1998. It's all been downhill from there, IMO.
[0] Total Idiocy To Sucker Underbred Public
"Six days doesn't seem a very long term test to me"
In terms of a nominal lunar mission, it's very long. The limiting factor is often propellent. If the RCS system runs out of fuel, that's the spacecraft coming back to Earth as a meteor (or the moon). There are likely experiments onboard with lifespan considerations as well.
"That's why NASA never talk about the 4th crew member of Apollo11"
Turns out he was having an affair with a wife of one of the mission directors so all mention was edited out and he was left behind.
"A smart monkey never monkeys with another monkey's monkey" ~James Harman
to propel Orion at 8.9 feet per second
First, 8.9 ft/s relative to what?
Second, (as commented elsewhere) stop using daft non-SI units for engineering reports. Only the Usains and a few others are still using obsolete units and there are only 280 million of them, call it 500 million tops including the rest. There are now 8 billion of us on the planet.
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This appears to be lifted directly from a NASA progress blog at https://blogs.nasa.gov/artemis/2022/11/24/artemis-i-flight-day-nine-orion-one-day-away-from-distant-retrograde-insertion/ and NASA are USA.
I assume it is the change to the orbital velocity, it’s barely more than walking pace so a tiny correction. I can’t get my head round why that requires 17 second burn, must be very low impulse boosters.
>but convert them to outdated imperial units for reporting to the three countries on the planet that are still backward enough to be using them
But not, unfortunately, to Lockheed Martin
Also, WTF! You can understand manufacturing the parts in the USA using medieval units and even using archaic-standard nuts and bolts. But who in the name of Cthulhu does orbital calculations in foot-poundals ?
"Deep Space. Deep Space starts, maybe, on the far side of the Asteroid Belt. Or, perhaps, beyond Jupiter orbit. Or, indeed, beyond the Oort Cloud. Just beyond the Moon is local space."
I'll go with the heliopause. Yes, I know, it's not a fixed distance.
Why dont they detach a drone that can film the main vehicle as it travels along,without a course correction.Then release a new one after each course correction and eventual loss of signal. At least there will be something interesting to look at.
Should just fly alongside as its spaaace.
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