NASA’s Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft will lift off from lunar orbit Thursday afternoon (Dec. 1), and you can watch the action live.
Unmanned Orion is scheduled to perform a crucial 105-second engine burn at 4:54 p.m. EST (2154 GMT) Thursday, which will send the capsule out of orbit around the moon and mark the start of its long journey back to Earth.
NASA will provide live coverage of the milestone starting at 4:30 p.m. EST (2130 GMT). Watch it live here on Space.com or directly through the space agency (opens in a new tab).
In photos: Incredible views of the debut of NASA’s Artemis 1 moon rocket
Orion launched atop a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on Nov. 16, kicking off NASA’s long-awaited Artemis 1 mission.
As its name suggests, Artemis 1 is the first flight of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a manned base near the lunar south pole in the late 2020s.
Artemis 1 is a moving cruise for both Orion and SLS, a way to demonstrate that both vehicles are ready to carry astronauts into deep space. If all goes well with the current mission, Artemis 2 will send astronauts around the Moon in 2024 and Artemis 3 will put boots on the lunar surface a year later.
And things have been going well so far; the SLS did its job on November 16, and Orion has been ticking boxes ever since. One of the most important milestones was insertion into a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the Moon, which the spacecraft achieved with an engine burnout on November 25.
On Wednesday (November 30), the Artemis 1 team held a meeting to determine whether or not Orion is ready to leave DRO, and the result was unanimous.
“Every member of our mission management team polled wants to return Orion to Earth,” Artemis mission director Mike Sarafin said during a press conference Wednesday evening.
So Orion’s time at DRO will come to an end on Thursday. The capsule still has some spaceflight ahead of it, though: Orion isn’t scheduled to land on its home planet until December 11.
On that day, the spacecraft will parachute into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. NASA and the US Navy are already training for homecoming, practicing the recovery operation that will end the Artemis 1 mission.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).