On Monday, NASA’s unmanned Orion spacecraft successfully accomplished its closest fly-by of the moon. The spacecraft was 81 miles above the lunar surface and travelling at 5,102 miles per hour, according to a tweet from James Free, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development.
The fourth orbital trajectory adjustment burn of the Orion spacecraft had been successfully accomplished on the sixth day of the Artemis I mission. The tweet stated: “Fly-by finished! NASA This morning, at a speed of 5,102 mph and 81 miles above the lunar surface, Orion successfully accomplished its closest fly-by of the Moon. We performed an outward-powered fly-by burn before the fly-by, accelerating at a pace of more than 580 mph. Look at it here:
Given that the Moon is four times larger than the World, one social media user who saw James Free’s image said, “It’s amazing how small the earth looks in comparison to the Moon… “Wait for a second”
“The moon is bigger than this dot when I look at it from the earth,” I said. The size of Earth exceeds that of the moon. There’s a problem here,” read a second comment.
“With how near it came to the moon, it would make sense to utilise a wide-angle lens,” a third user observed. This would then fill the frame with so much space that the Earth would appear tiny. It doesn’t imply that a person could have seen it as being so small. Others praised the image as being “amazing.”
At 6:44 AM UTC, the spaceship Orion, which is empty of the crew, finished its powered fly-by (12:14 PM IST). At 6:57 UTC, it passed our globe at a height of 81 miles (12:27 P.M. IST). Prior to the fire, the spacecraft was travelling at a speed of 2,128 miles per hour. After the burn, that speed rose to 5,102 miles per hour.
Following the outbound fly-by, Orion passed over the Apollo 11 landing site at Tranquility Base at a distance of about 1,400 miles at 7:37 A.M. UTC (01:07 P.M. IST), according to NASA. It then passed by the Apollo 12 site at a height of about 7,700 miles before flying over the Apollo 14 site at a height of about 6,000 miles.
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