NASA's Artemis 1 suffers 1st glitch as Orion spacecraft goes incommunicado for 47 minutes

The flawless journey to the Moon turned scary for NASA for a while as the mission control center lost communication with the Orion spacecraft. The agency, in its update, revealed that the controllers at Johnson Space Center experienced a 47-minute-long unexpected blackout starting at 11:39 am IST on November 23 while reconfiguring the communication link between Orion and Deep Space Network (DSN). The DSN is a network of three huge radio antennas located in California, Madrid, and Canberra. 

The communication, however, has been re-established now and teams are investigating the cause of this glitch. “The team resolved the issue with a reconfiguration on the ground side”, NASA said in its official blog. “Engineers are examining data from the event to help determine what happened, and the command and data handling officer will be downlinking data recorded onboard Orion during the outage to include in that assessment”.

Although the agency has confirmed that the glitch did not impact Orion's health and the spacecraft is still in a healthy configuration. Orion was launched on November 16 atop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for the Artemis 1 mission and it is being tested in this uncrewed mission for astronauts who would later board this capsule.

According to NASA's Orion live tracker, the spacecraft is over 3,40,000 km away from Earth and about 75,000 km from the Moon. Currently, it is moving away from the lunar surface after the November 21 flyby and the mission controllers will insert Orion in the distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the Moon. The DRO is the path where a spacecraft travels around the Moon in a direction opposite to the Moon's orbit around the Earth.

NASA says that Orion will pass the record set by Apollo 13 for the farthest distance traveled by a human-rated spacecraft at 4,00,171 km from Earth on November 26 and will be at its maximum distance of 4,32,192 km on November 28. On November 21, the spacecraft got as close as 130 km to the lunar surface during the first powered flyby and the second flyby is scheduled for 3 am IST on November 26.