NASA reveals thrilling plan to photograph Artemis Orion spacecraft's return from Moon

NASA in collaboration with the US Navy Air Operations team has planned to photograph the Orion spacecraft as it descends through the Earth's atmosphere in the final stages of the Artemis I mission. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch atop the debutant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket which would liftoff possibly in August this year. Interestingly, the agency has chalked out a thrilling plan to capture the descending Orion.

According to NASA, it will strategically deploy two helicopters over the Pacific ocean with photographers ready with their cameras and the cabin doors wide open. The spacecraft will make its descent at a speed of over 40,000 kilometres per hour and it will be slowed down to about 483 kilometres per hour due to the Earth's atmospheric friction. Orion will further slow down to approximately 32 kilometres per hour after its parachutes are deployed before a splashdown off the coast of southern California.

How would photographing from helicopters help?

NASA says that the objective of this mission is to capture images of Orion during its return from a close distance from the helicopters, about 10,000 feet in the air. "Our primary objective is to get quality engineering imagery of Orion during descent and splashdown", Don Reed, lead for the agency's Air Operations team said in a statement. "Parachute analysts can analyse the imagery of components of the crew module recovery system and ensure we are meeting our flight test objectives". 

Reed's team in one of the helicopters would be deployed to track the crew module whereas the other would track the forward bay cover, part of Orion's hardware which protects the spacecraft's top portion.

How would the team capture images of Orion?

The imagery will be collected through a gyro-stabilised, ultra-high-definition 8K video camera system which will be operated by one team member on the helicopters. In addition to this, a still photographer and a Navy video system will be deployed on the back and the nose of the helicopter, respectively, to capture the images. NASA says that the images will not be streamed or shared in real-time but will be recorded for analysis after the mission. 

Interestingly, the photographers will use the high temperature of Orion's heat shield to locate the capsule in the sky as it heads for a splashdown. The teams will be assisted by a Navy system called a multi-spectral targeting system which uses an infrared video camera. After the spacecraft's heat shield reaches a temperature of 2,760°C, the infrared camera will pick up Orion's location. "Once the infrared camera operator has Orion in their crosshairs, they'll announce the position of the spacecraft, allowing the video camera operator to find that point and acquire the crew module", Reed said. Recently, the teams conducted the Underway Recovery Test 9 (URT-9) to practice photographing the free-falling spacecraft.