Orion Had LOST Contact With NASA Nearly An Hour When Heading To The Moon's Orbit

Orion, and the spacecraft remain in a healthy configuration. (photo: dock. NASA)

JAKARTA - The Artemis I mission that launched the Orion spacecraft experienced communication disruptions for nearly an hour during its journey to the Moon's Orbit Retrograde AGE (DRO).

NASA's mission control center in Houston, Texas, United States (US), lost data to and from Orion at 12:09 CST for 47 minutes. Knowing this, the crew then reconfigured a communication link between Orion and the Deep Space Network (DSN).

Now, the crew is conducting an analysis of the cause of the problem to find out why the signal suddenly disappeared even though they have tested the procedure several times over the past week.

However, the data is not lost because it is recorded on the Orion onboard system. Data and Command Handling Officer (C&DH), an office that will handle the Orion interface for future manned Artemis II missions, will link data recorded during the outage as part of its analysis.

"There is no impact on Orion, and the spacecraft remains in a healthy configuration," NASA said in a statement.

Launching ZDNet, Friday, November 25, DRO is one of Orion's destinations to optimize fuel storage and that's where the spacecraft will remain stable for the next few weeks.

In addition, the object in DRO is balanced between the gravitational pull of Earth and the Moon. NASA needs to save Orion fuel for propulsion corrections and combustion in order to fly past the Moon again and travel back to Earth when it comes to landing in the Pacific Ocean around December 8.

Orion will leave DRO on December 1, after which it will begin flying across the Moon on December 5. "The spacecraft will reach its furthest distance from the Moon on Friday, November 25, just before carrying out the next major arson to enter orbit," NASA said.

"The DRO insertion fire is the second of a pair of maneuvers needed to push Orion into a very stable orbit that requires minimal fuel consumption while traveling around the Moon," he added.