NASA revealed Onboard Data from the NASA Orion on the Journey To The Moon! Astronauts Declared...

And Houston Integrity, we just wanted to share a little bit of the sentiment up here as we came around the planet and we're zooming over just 100 nautical miles above it if you got a moment. Please Jeremy, we are all ears. So TOI, the crew's feeling pretty good up here on our way to the moon and we just wanted to communicate to everyone around the planet who's worked to make Artemis possible that we firmly felt the power of your perseverance during every second of that burn. Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of and it's your hopes for the future that carry us now on this journey around the moon. Thank you for those words. Good evening and welcome to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and welcome to our Artemis 2 status update. I'm Rachel Kraft with NASA Communications and I'm joined by several NASA managers this evening to talk about our recent translunar injection burn to send four astronauts on the Artemis 2 mission to the moon and about how the test flight is going overall. They are Dr. Lori Glaze who leads NASA's Artemis program, Judd Freeling, ascent flight director for the mission, and Howard Hugh, Orion program manager. We'll have some opening remarks and then take questions both from reporters here in the room and on the phone and those of you who are joining us by phone can press star one to get into the question queue and with that we'll start with Lori. Great, thank you Rachel. So ladies and gentlemen, I am so so excited to be able to tell you that for the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit. With Artemis 2's successful five minute and 50 second translunar injection burn this evening, our four crew members, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cook, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen are now on their trajectory toward the moon. The burn was executed by our flight operations team here in and it was flawless. The burn was the last major firing of this mission. From this point forward, the laws of orbital mechanics are going to carry our crew to the moon, around the far side, and back to Earth. Our crew is healthy and our spacecraft is performing really well. After we've had a series of checkouts since launch and again everything really performing pretty well and we are on the path that we designed for this mission. But just a reminder, again you can hear us keep saying it over and over again, this is still a test flight. We are getting and we're going to continue to get lots of new data every day, important information as we continue learning how we're going to operate this Orion spacecraft in the actual space environment. I'll tell you we're already learning a lot as we go. We've encountered several things along the way. We're not really tracking anything right now that's of concern, but anything that we've encountered since we've launched was brought to our mission management team today and discussed and the satisfactory path forward on every case and a unanimous decision to proceed forward with the go for the translunar injection burn. So you'll hear a little bit more about some of that here in a minute, all the things that we've been doing. Just a reminder, we got eight days of work ahead and we intend to learn as much as we can, everything that we can, that this vehicle can teach us. And with that, oh let's see, before I do that I did want to, we had a couple images we wanted to share. Let's see if we can pull some of those up. I wanted to share one of my favorite images. This one I saw last night actually as I was getting onto the plane to fly here from Florida. This one popped up and I just absolutely love this one. Looking out the window you can see the solar array wing there and the OMS engine from the Orion spacecraft and then you can see Earth's crescent in the back. I just thought it was absolutely gorgeous with our crew members being able to see out the window there and get that photo. It's just absolutely beautiful. And then the second image I wanted to show you, you'll hear a lot more from Howard about the proximity operations demonstration that was conducted yesterday evening. And let's see, is that one going to come up? It's coming back, there it is. And in this image you can see Victor Glover on the left there, he was using the manual controls to maneuver the spacecraft and then Reid Wiseman on the right there was calling out the commands. So it was really, I hope some of you got a chance to watch that. I was riveted. It was absolutely spectacular to to hear Victor's narration of the whole activity. So super cool. So with all of that I am going to hand it over to Judd and he can talk us through some of the technical details about the flight so far. All right, thanks Lori. It's been a great couple of days to be in the space business. Yesterday SLS put us right on the money during Ascent. We started with some checkouts by the crew from both the water dispenser and the toilet. Those were successful. And ICPS then burned us with our perigee raise maneuver, got us in a stable orbit. We did have a brief comm outage that was due to a ground issue that we have now rectified and we understand that's not going to be a problem henceforth. And then, let's see, the ICPS then gave us a great amount of energy, put us in high earth orbit with the apogee raise burn. Again, right down the money. So really happy with that burn. After that, as Lori mentioned, Victor did the Proxops demonstration, gave us a lot of great feedback on how the vehicle responds in preparation for future rendezvous operations. So very valuable data. We also checked out all of the carbon dioxide scrubbers. All three beds successfully checked out and CO2 is doing great in the vehicle. Once we were done with the Proxops demonstration, the ICPS on its own did the automatic deploy of the four CubeSats and then also ICPS did its disposal burn and so that all went well. In the middle of the crew sleep, we also had them wake up and do the perigee raise burn and that was 100% successful. Got us again back into a stable orbit, raised our perigee to about 100 nautical miles. So we're happy with that performance as well. This morning, the crew woke up. They had a conference with the flight control team and our lead flight director, Jeff Radigan, went over some details of anything that they had, changes to the timeline, which were minimal. They did an exercise test of the flywheel. That was successful. Reid reported that it was exactly like training. His arms were really, really tired and he got a great cardio workout. So we took some samples of what the carbon dioxide was while we were doing exercise and that was all great as well. And of course, just a little under an hour ago, we did the translunar injection, which sets us up for the free turn around the moon and also for splashdown in San Diego. So with that, I'll hand it over to Howard to give you some more details on it right now. All right. Thanks, Judd. Really excited to be here. Wow. What a great two days, huh? I haven't slept, I don't think, very much over the last 24 hours just following all the things that happened for the Orion spaceship. We had a perfect ride uphill, got into orbit, spent a good day just checking out systems and getting ready for TLI that Lori talked about and a successful TLI and a really great precision burn that we just had. But I'll talk about the things that we accomplished yesterday. Yesterday, as you know, we did a proximity operations demonstration with a centerline camera and with a spacecraft I call test driving the car. It's been an awesome event for all the engineers and the team that's worked on it to hear Victor and Reed talk about our spaceship and the work that we put in to put into this capability for manual flying. I would say that, first of all, we accomplished all the test objectives that we set out for this proximity operations. We had two precision tests and I'll describe a little bit about what those were, but I'll send with a picture first to show you and describe. This is a very close-in picture. These three pictures on the, I guess, upper left of the picture is our centerline docking target right in the middle. It's a standoff cross that you'll see. It's a two-foot wide target. This is the target that we're going to use for future missions. This is the exact flight configuration that we use, so it's really important that we got that on the interim cryogenic propulsion stage. So we were able to get that on that stage and what we do, as I describe it, is as we separate from the ICPS, we do a backflip five degrees per second and we back away all the way as far in this demonstration was about 400 feet. And that back away scenario, that allows us to have a good standoff understanding. We're pretty far away, not this picture, but I'll talk a little bit about where this is going. Then we start doing what I call course manual piloting and this allows, and you might have heard this, what Victor was doing was basically moving side to side with the spaceship, up and down, and then doing the rotation pitch, roll, yaw, making sure that the response from the spacecraft and the performance is what he's seeing. And the reason it's course is because you're so far away at 400 feet that you want to make sure you have big maneuvers so you can see the target going out of your field of view a little bit. So that's what we did at the initial part and then we slowly started coming in and approaching the vehicle. And that picture that you see in the upper left side is almost to 33 feet, about 40 feet away I think. And that's where we will do what I call fine manual piloting. So we're just doing a little bit of the same thing, side to side, up and down, doing the pitch, roll, and yaw, maneuver, and handling. And you heard that if you watched closely and some great commentary, especially it was heartwarming to hear. I know I talked to some of our team members today, you know, to hear that how well their baby worked, you know, operating precisely. That is exactly what we wanted to do, holding the attitude and being able to maneuver very well and described I think just very excitedly by Reid and both Reid and Jeremy, I mean Reid and Victor. I think it's really a great moment for all of us who have been working in this arena to get this demonstration off. And of course that wasn't the end of it. We did back away to about 65 feet and we let the ICPS do a maneuver. And then we had another target, what we were calling the two-dimensional target. So it didn't have a standoff cross like we did on the ICPS nose. What we did was add a good two-degree target or two-dimensional target on the spacecraft on the ICPS. And then we did the same maneuver, but a little different. This maneuver was what we call six degree of freedom maneuver, where we were tracking and also maneuvering by rotating as well. So you're translating and rotating at the same time. And that allowed you to have a different characteristic of the vehicle performance in a manual piloting approach. And we were also able to go to this 33-foot range. So really important demonstration of both the fine and coarse handling of the spaceship for future missions as we go forward. And that was something that we wanted to make sure we bought down some risk. And you saw the images of the centerline camera. And performance was outstanding. And of course the crew was outstanding. They did a terrific job. I actually flew the simulator. I did not qualify for this mission unfortunately. So I definitely wasn't ready for this kind of mission. But Victor just did terrific and followed everything. And I saw the track today in terms of predictions. And I got to give kudos to him. He followed it right along. And it was a really great opportunity to demonstrate our capability. So that was a really important demonstration and test of our rendezvous and prox ops capabilities that we're going to need for the future. But also in that 24-hour period, we had to obviously demonstrate our readiness for translunar injection. We were able to really track a lot of the subsystems that we've learned from on Artemis 1. But also the most important subsystem when we put humans on board is the life support system. And I'm happy to report that the performance of the CO2 scrubber, the ability to distribute water, control the temperature inside the cabin is exactly as we predicted. And in some cases better. And so that was really great. And of course across all the other subsystems that we demonstrate in Artemis 1, like power generation was better than predicted. Also over 13 kilowatts of power generation and our ability to control, like I said, the inside cabin and control the temperature across all the parts of the spacecraft was right on and nominal. So that was really good to see. And of course we were ready to execute the TLI burn today. And our guidance navigation control system was ready to go and demonstrated through this burn that its ability to handle this type of burn and precision that's needed to take us to the moon and come back into Earth's atmosphere. So really great overall demonstration of the Proxops. Really great demonstration of the core subsystems that we have on board the spaceship that's required to execute the rest of the days of this Artemis 2 mission. And finally I would say that we had, I would say, really great opportunity to just understand our overall performance across all these subsystems and making sure that we're ready to commit the crew to a safe journey to the moon and back. And we demonstrated that over the last 24 hours. We were able to, as Lori said, have a mission management team review of that and determined that we would go for TLI. And I'm just really happy that we're headed to the moon. Thank you. All right, it's time now for questions. We'll start here in the room and then we have several on the phone. A reminder, please raise your hand if you're here. We'll have a mic coming around. And then if you are joining by phone, star one can get you into the question queue. And we will begin in the room here. Let's come around with the mic here in the front. Tarek, yeah. Thank you very much. Tarek Malik with space.com. And I think it's for Howard. You know, the TLI seemed to go quite well, although I guess there were some reports of a couple of caution alarms that the crew reported. And then the mission control said, you know, it was not to worry about. I'm just curious what those alarms were that or those caution lights were and, you know, how they were, I guess, set aside so quickly. Okay, I'll let Jed maybe give some highlights there. Yeah, so about 15-20 minutes before TLI, we had a couple of reconfigured, nominal reconfiguration changes of the atmosphere revitalization system, the cabin fans. And when we were moding those to different mode, the fan speed change caused the cabin sensors to dip below the caution limit for just a bit. And, of course, that rang an alarm that was a suspected cabin leak. It was a false. That was a false indication. And so we quickly knew that there was no leak. We knew that it was just the sensors dipping low pretty quickly. Additionally, there were some RCS, reaction control system, SM manifold messages that we had been seeing previously. Essentially, whenever we're using that system, there's a pressure sensor divergence. And we've seen that before. And so we knew exactly what those signatures were. So again, not an issue at all. I guess two questions for Howard. You know, first of all, quick question, were there any thruster issues during the Proxox demo, any sort of outages or concerns? With that regarded, did everything perform nominally? And then does the performance and Victor's piloting during that exercise give you confidence in Orion's handling for the maneuvers contemplated in Artemis III with one or two of the HLS? Yeah, no issues with the thrusters. They perform nominally and the performance is excellent. Relative to, you know, future confidence, you know, this gives us a lot of confidence in terms of close in. I've talked previously about being on the docking axis. It's very important. We are very dependent on the cameras and the LiDAR that will be on Artemis III and above for our relative navigation. And so this was a really good exercise of that. And of course, you know, hearing the crew in a preliminary way through verbally, but we'll look at the data very closely and get the post-flight report from them in detail. I think at first indication that the vehicle performed better than obviously they expected. And I think, you know, for us, it was really a good understanding of how the human, the loop part worked. Now that we're committed with TLI during Transwinter Coast, the attitude you're going to hold, what are the out the view windows for the crew? Are they going to be, what are they going to be able to see Earth with regard to Earth or the moon? And also prior to the flight, you were talking about based on TLI, what they would get to see when they do the close observation. It sounds like based on what Ike said and you said that the handling qualities, the tight deadbeat damping, that this is better than you predicted. Is that, is that a true statement? Predictions are hard. There's a human, the loop kind of element and we practice that. So I would say, yes, definitely maybe better than we anticipated in a lot of ways because there's variations by which we go into space. On a closed loop control system, for guidance navigation control, when you have an automated system, you know precisely and you predict exactly how the system will respond. The crew is well trained and Victor did exactly what he needed to do and the spacecraft responded. As far as what, where the vehicle will be pointed, most of the time we spend in a tail to sun attitude. So we take the back end of the vehicle pointed towards the sun. And so whatever the geometry is, you know, that's, that's what you get. We, we sometimes have the advantage when we have good power balance, we can move the solar rays that have cameras on the end and we can move those around and, and, and see what, you know, look back at the earth or look forward at the moon. Also on, you know, flight day six, whenever we do the lunar closer approach we'll change attitude, make sure that the crew has those views of the lunar surface. The lighting of the, of the moon, this was 20% lit, you know, area, so. Thank you, Otto, CNN. A quick question for Howard. I know Victor said that he was going to give the Cooper Harper rating scales during the, during the prox ops. Are you able to share those numbers? Just curious to know how it handled. And then also would love to just ask a general question about the crew, how they're adjusting to orbit. Yeah, I'm sure we can share the Cooper Harper handling qualities, but look forward to that. Yeah, definitely. As far as the crew members, they're doing great. There's no indication that they're having any problems at all, so. I wanted to ask about the troubleshooting of the toilet that happened on the first day. And, and it turns out, I guess, we didn't put enough in. And, and so the, the pump was not fully wetted, and so it has automatic fault detection in that, that if it, if it's not, you know, fully wetted, it'll shut itself down. So once we figured out that we didn't put enough water in, we, we put more in there, made sure that it was essentially primed, the pump was primed, and then the toilet came right back up. Able to check out the secondary vent line for the, for the urine as well. And so that, I think, both lines are working well and really happy about that. This is a great example of some of the procedural things as we're learning to work and, and live in the Orion capsule. Talk about the stress level in mission control prior to the TLI burn. I mean, were you really sweating it there? And now that that's done, do you have any new revised numbers for the moon, lunar flyby distance? And, you know, everything was, it seemed like it was going very smoothly. They always seem so calm and controlled down there in mission control. Up in the room where I was with several other folks, you know, as soon as we taught, you know, counted down and we started that burn, we just sat in silence and watched the clock go and waited for, for that statement that said the burn was complete. So the anticipated distance, I believe, was around 4,600 miles from the surface. The nominal burn, which we did, the max distance that our folks calculated was 2,000 or 219,639 nautical miles max distance from the earth. They're consummate professionals. I wouldn't say there's any stress level at all. Hi, I have a question on the exercising. So I was watching the video when Reed was exercising, and I know mission control kind of started chuckling because you could see the movement. Would you say that Orion was in higher orbit or lower orbit during the TLI burn, just because it seemed so close to the earth? Thanks. I don't think we saw anything that was, that we didn't expect. I asked our guidance navigation guys if there was any issues and they said, nope. Let's see. And the other question was, were we in a higher orbit when we did TLI? Yes, technically we were, but we were at the lowest part, perigee, of the orbit. So we were about 100 nautical miles off the earth's surface, traveling about 23 and change, 23,000 and change miles per hour. The water dispenser situation, it sounded like just before the burn they were doing what they were calling like water up, and they were bagging up water in plastic bags. Could you just go over exactly what the issues were with the dispenser and why it was decided to have backup water and how much water the astronauts actually bagged up? Thank you. And so it essentially isolated two tanks on one side and two tanks on the other. Each end of those tanks goes to one of two different water dispensers, a primary and a secondary, so we have full access to all of the water. However, in an abundance of caution, we decided it's probably good just in case we have a subsequent failure of an isolation valve to bag some water and preserve that just in case we have a subsequent failure. Hey, thanks. I just wanted to clarify the predicted maximum distance from earth. That assumed a perfect TLI burn, so I haven't gone and run those numbers again. And just real quick, the reason I asked, of course, is because that's far below the, you know, record breaking for Apollo 13. Is that your guidance understanding, I guess? That's in nautical miles. So the Apollo distance record in nautical miles was about 216,000 nautical miles. How do you feel like everything, is it going to plan and are there any concerns you're keeping an eye on at this point? And then more specifically, I was curious if you could tell us about what to expect from the first high-res images and video as well as when we might see the solar eclipse. Thank you. You know, things are going really well. Right now we're not tracking any issues of concern. It'll be really cool when they're out and beyond the moon, be able to look back with the moon eclipsing the sun. They'll be able to see the sun's corona. That's kind of a cool, exciting thing to do. So they've been trained on it and they're looking forward to it. Hi, Michael Atkinson, Houston Public Media. There was a little bit of online chatter about the Outlook issues. Sometimes Outlook has issues getting configured, especially when you don't have a network that's directly connected. And so essentially we just had to reload his files on Outlook, you know, to get it working. You talked earlier about a ground issue related to the communications problem. Can you explain that a little bit more? So we have a processor at White Sands ground terminal. It's called a serial communication processor. In order to get return telemetry, it has to translate the radio messages to something that our front-end processors at MCC can understand. So that processor is supposed to be in a configuration for nominal testband Orion telemetry. When we did, we essentially found a bug that we didn't know was there. So when we did our checkouts, part of our checkout is to put in a configuration for the emergency comm configuration. When we commanded it back to the nominal configuration, it showed that it had taken, but it did not actually. And so we basically had to go into low-level commanding to see what was the actual configuration and do that. So it's a software bug we now understand that we hadn't seen before. And so no issue with us going forward. I was just curious, what would you say has been the biggest learning moment about the Orion spacecraft so far during the mission? And have there been any surprises? And I always go to life support, you know, being able to control humidity and scrubbing CO2, which performance is really great. In fact, we're maybe becoming, we need a little bit more humidity. I think it's doing too well sometimes, but I think those are things that are, like Lori said, we're learning, we're adjusting how to operate the spaceship with actual people on board and that are actually putting out CO2 and breathing in oxygen. So I think this is one of the things that we've learned in that 24 hours. We learned a lot. We expect good performance from our subsystems. So we're very happy about that. My question for Lori, in terms of a little clarification on the timeline with the eclipse. It is flight day six that the crew will be behind the moon. Let's see. And your other question was ship-to-ship com. I think we were going to do that on flight day eight or nine. I don't know where that ended up. How fast will Orion move as it heads to the moon, like the maximum speed? 24,500 miles an hour. Additional question about if the crew has spoken with family yet. Yeah, I don't believe we've, they haven't had time to talk to their families yet. They've been really busy. So we'll make time for that as we get, now that we're past TLI. The RCS thrusters on the service module, are they European technology or American technology? Oh, I would say the RCS or reaction control system, if you're asking that, that is a European built system. And what is being learned in the mission that will tangibly improve life for people down here? But I feel certain we're going to be pushing boundaries of technologies as well. Not just in the systems that we're flying on the rockets, but even in the, some of the things we're testing out inside the crew cabin for the crew to use, the cutting edge of technology. So a lot of amazing things there. It's always a wonderful question. And I really feel like the exploration that we do is just inspirational for everyone here on earth. Do you think the public, when they hear go for TLI, or when we speak about it normally during a press conference like this, does it really convey how the momentous moment that it actually captures? They're very measured. They're very controlled. They execute and they're ready to respond. Yeah, I would say we probably reflect on that after our shift. The crew sounded very busy in the time I was hearing the loops today, and I was just wondering on the astronauts and individual task timelines, if they're kind of on schedule for that or falling behind. So I would say there were, as far as the timeline goes, there were a few things that the crew was not able to get to today and yesterday, and that's fine. This is, we knew this was going to be a very, very packed first two days. And now once we've passed TLI, we've got lots more time to do things. Good evening. I have a question. Has there been a formal report issued yet on the possible damages caused by Artemis 2 compared to Artemis 1? I understand that it caused some damage to the elevators and also burnt through the circuit area. Is there any report issued on that as yet? And what I can tell you is that our initial assessment is showing that most of the damage is really largely cosmetic. Really, overall, everything's looking pretty good, especially compared to Artemis 1. We know we're going to have some repairs that we'll need to do, but those repairs, the repairs that we made following Artemis 1 largely worked, so that's a good thing. We are in the process of doing an in-depth assessment of what kind of damage was received there. We do know that there were some bolts, some latching bolts that perhaps didn't hold as anticipated, and there was some, I believe, some issues down in the firing well there. But we're still doing the assessment, so hold tight, and we'll get you some more details as we better understand exactly where that mobile launcher is right now. How closely did you study in planning this mission the free return slingshot trajectory of Apollo 13 in terms of the lessons learned of what to do similarly or what to avoid, and how different will this trajectory be from the only other time humans have taken that trajectory around the moon and back? Yeah, it's similar. We got on a free return trajectory on Apollo 13, much very similar to the one that we are doing now. And when they're going around the moon, what are the visuals going to be like? When we were on closest approach for, say, Artemis 1 or even, you know, Apollo 8, for instance, you know, 3,000 to 4,000 nautical miles away, so the moon will look smaller. Certainly the camera technology is a lot better than it was in the 60s, so we'll have that advantage. We also have some really long lenses that the crew have for their handheld cameras, Nikons and Z9s. So hopefully when we get those downlinked, there'll be really sharp images that we've all come to pass those abort scenarios. It's about a day or two past TLI where it's no longer feasible to do what we call a direct abort, and it's more likely that we'll get home at the same time if we just continue on in the free return trajectory. All right. Well, with that, we'll go ahead and conclude. I want to thank our participants for joining us today. You can follow all of our mission progress in the multitude of ways we have available on nasa.gov, and we look forward to providing another update tomorrow afternoon. Thank you for joining us.