Orion on the Well Deck of USS Anchorage Photo credit: NASA The Orion spacecraft has completed its 2,700 mile cross country journey from...
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| Orion on the Well Deck of USS Anchorage Photo credit: NASA |
The Orion spacecraft has completed its 2,700 mile cross country journey from Naval Base San Diego to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Thursday.
The NASA Ground Systems Development and Operations team transported the spacecraft across the country by truck, and the entire trip took eight days.
Orion’s trailer and transport fixture were brought to the Mission Operations Support Building where the accumulation of dirt and grime from the road was removed.
The spacecraft will then be brought into the Launch Abort System Facility, where the team will remove the back shell panels and start post-flight assessments in early January. Engineers will perform a visual inspection of hardware such as cabling, fluid lines, propulsion systems and avionics boxes to determine how these components sustained Exploration Flight Test-1.
An initial inspection of the crew module turned up nothing unexpected. There were indications of some micrometeoroid orbital debris strikes on the sides of Orion, which was anticipated.
After the initial inspections are completed, the spacecraft is to be transported to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility for offloading of hydrazine and ammonia.
In March, Lockheed Martin will provide a complete data analysis report to NASA, which will include information about the vehicle’s performance and recommendations based on the results. The information will be used to make improvements to Orion’s design before its next flight, Exploration Mission-1, when it will launch uncrewed on top of NASA’s new Space Launch System for the first time into a large orbit around the moon.
Heat shield samples already have been removed and sent to a laboratory where their thickness, strength and charring will be examined.
While the information is being gathered from the flight test, testing also will continue on Earth. On Dec. 18, NASA engineers dropped a test version of the Orion capsule from a C-17 aircraft 25,000 feet above U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The latest in a series of tests designed to certify Orion’s parachute system, the test simulated a failure of one of Orion’s three main parachutes for a first-time demonstration of several modifications made to the parachute system to improve its performance.
Panels for the pressure vessel that will form the inner structure for the next Orion crew module are in production and set to be welded together at the end of summer 2015. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency is building the test article of the Orion service module they will be supplying for Exploration Mission-1, and assembly of the launch abort system for that flight will begin in April.
The crew module will be refurbished for use in Ascent Abort-2 in 2018, a test of Orion’s launch abort system.
More at: www.nasa.gov/orion
