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Orion, as an uncrewed crew-rated vehicle, smashed the 52-year-old distance record set during Apollo 13 on Saturday (November 26) at 7:42 a.m. ET. The capsule successfully entered into its target orbit—a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon—on Friday at around 5:00 p.m. ET. Ground controllers successfully executed a maintenance burn on Saturday to fine-tune the capsule’s trajectory, according to a NASA blog post.
On Sunday, mission engineers began scheduled tests of Orion’s reaction control thrusters, while also activating Callisto, a tech demo from Lockheed Martin, Amazon, and Cisco that’s meant to evaluate the feasibility of using voice activation and video teleconferencing technology in the space environment. The next major event in the Artemis 1 mission won’t happen until Thursday, December 1, when Orion will attempt its second and final flyby of the Moon and chart a course back to Earth. The capsule is scheduled to perform its atmospheric reentry and splashdown on December 11.
Related: See the Coolest Images So Far From Orion’s Historic Mission to the Moon
The Artemis 1 mission has, for the most part, been smooth sailing. Well, there was that scary incident on Wednesday, November 23, when controllers unexpectedly lost contact with Orion for 47 minutes. And early on in the mission, plumes from Orion’s thrusters were confusing the spacecraft’s star tracker, a system that uses the positions of the stars to assist with orientation and navigation. This issue has since been resolved, and the star tracker is “performing perfectly,” Jim Geffre, Orion vehicle integration manager at NASA, told reporters during a November 18 press briefing.
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Artemis 1 is the first of what NASA hopes will be a series of increasingly sophisticated missions to the Moon. Future plans include a crewed lunar landing and the first lunar space station, known as Gateway. The ultimate goal, however, is for the Artemis program to serve as a stepping stone to Mars.
More: NASA’s Orion Sends Back Haunting New Views of the Moon’s Tortured Surface