Artemis I (Artemis 1)

01Mission facts

02Mission timeline

1. November 16, 2022

   Liftoff at 06:47 UTC from Launch Complex 39B, the first flight of the Space Launch System

2. November 21, 2022

   Outbound powered flyby: a 2-minute-30-second burn; Orion passes 81 miles above the Moon at 5,102 mph

3. November 28, 2022

   Maximum distance from Earth, 268,563 miles, reached during the distant retrograde orbit

4. December 5, 2022

   Return powered flyby: closest approach of 80.6 miles; a 3-minute-27-second burn commits Orion to splashdown

5. December 8, 2022

   After a weather review, the landing site is shifted to near Guadalupe Island, south of the primary area

6. December 11, 2022

   Splashdown at 17:40 UTC, 50 years to the day after the Apollo 17 Moon landing; recovery aboard USS Portland

03The mission

Artemis I was the first integrated flight of the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft: an uncrewed shakedown of the vehicles that now carry Artemis crews. Orion spent weeks in deep space, including about six days in a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon, a wide, stable orbit that took it farther from Earth than any spacecraft designed to carry people had ever been.

The mission validated Orion’s heat shield at lunar-return speeds, its deep-space navigation, and the SLS launch vehicle itself, clearing the way for the crewed Artemis II flyby that followed in 2026.

04Mission objectives

NASA’s priority-one test objective was demonstrating Orion at lunar re-entry conditions: the heat shield’s performance during the roughly 24,500 mph return from the Moon. Retrieving the spacecraft after splashdown was the priority-three objective, and the flight also served as the first full test of the skip entry technique that lets Orion splash down accurately at a chosen site.

05Two close passes over the Moon

Orion made two powered flybys within about 80 miles of the lunar surface. On November 21, 2022, the outbound flyby burn fired the orbital maneuvering system engine for 2 minutes 30 seconds, and shortly afterward Orion passed 81 miles above the Moon traveling at 5,102 mph, more than 230,000 miles from Earth.

On December 5, 2022, Orion made its second and final close approach, passing 80.6 miles above the surface. The return flyby burn, on the main engine of the European-built service module, lasted 3 minutes 27 seconds and changed the spacecraft’s velocity by about 655 mph, committing Orion to its December 11 splashdown.

06The hottest, fastest re-entry test

Coming back from the Moon, Orion hit the atmosphere at 24,581 mph (Mach 32), and its heat shield endured about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly half as hot as the surface of the Sun. Within about 20 minutes the capsule slowed from nearly 25,000 mph to about 20 mph for its parachute-assisted splashdown.

Artemis I was the first flight to use Orion’s skip entry: the capsule dipped into the upper atmosphere, used aerodynamic lift to skip back out, then re-entered for final descent. The technique splits deceleration into two events of about 4 g each and lets Orion fly up to 5,524 miles beyond its entry point to reach a precise landing area, versus up to 1,725 miles for Apollo capsules. Apollo-era engineers knew the concept but lacked the navigation and computing power to fly it.

07Ten CubeSats hitched a ride

Ten six-unit CubeSats, each limited to about 25 pounds, deployed from the rocket’s Orion stage adapter, among them Lunar IceCube (hunting water ice), LunaH-Map (mapping hydrogen in shadowed south pole craters), JAXA’s OMOTENASHI (an attempt at the world’s smallest lunar lander), BioSentinel (using yeast to measure deep-space radiation effects on living organisms), NEA Scout (a solar sail bound for a near-Earth asteroid), and EQUULEUS (imaging Earth’s plasmasphere).

08A crew of mannequins

The commander’s seat was occupied by Commander Moonikin Campos, a mannequin named for Arturo Campos, an engineer NASA credits as a key figure in bringing Apollo 13 safely home; the name won a public contest that drew more than 300,000 votes. Campos wore the Orion Crew Survival System suit that Artemis astronauts now wear during launch and entry, with radiation sensors plus acceleration and vibration sensors in and around the seat.

Two female-form torso phantoms, Helga and Zohar, flew as the MARE radiation experiment (NASA, Lockheed Martin, the Israel Space Agency, and the German Aerospace Center). Built of materials mimicking bone, soft tissue, and organs, each carries a grid of embedded detectors mapping internal radiation doses. Zohar wore the AstroRad protective vest; Helga flew unprotected as the control. Female forms were chosen because women typically have greater sensitivity to space radiation.

09Snoopy and Callisto

Snoopy flew as the zero gravity indicator in a custom orange flight suit, continuing a NASA tradition that dates to the Apollo-era Silver Snoopy safety award. The cabin also carried Callisto, a Lockheed Martin technology demonstration with Amazon and Cisco that tested the Alexa voice assistant and Webex video aboard Orion’s first flight.

10From the mission cameras

Tap a photo to enlarge.

11Sources

• NASA: Artemis I mission reference
• NASA: splashdown press release (Dec 11, 2022)
• NASA: Orion goes the max distance (Flight Day 13)
• NASA: skip entry technique explainer
• NASA: best images of Artemis I
• NASA: Artemis I mission page

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