While the NASA Orion spacecraft transports the crew around the Moon to the Artemis II mission, a team of expert engineers from the NASA Johnson Space Center mission in Houston will meticulously monitor the spaceship throughout its trip. They will operate from a new space in the mission control complex built to host the assessment room of the Orion mission (sea). Thanks to the success of Orion and the Artemis missions, NASA will return humanity on the Moon and prepare to land an American on the surface of Mars.
Inside the mission’s assessment room, dozens of engineers will monitor the spaceship and data collection, while the flight control team located in the White Mission Control flight control room works and sends orders to Orion during the flight. The flight control team will be based on the evaluation room expertise to help unexpected spacecraft behavior that can occur during the mission and help analyze Orion’s performance data.
The mission assessment team is made up of engineers from NASA, Lockheed Martin, ESA (European Space Agency) and Airbus who provide in-depth and expert knowledge of subsystems and functions of the spaceship to the mission. These functions are represented in 24 consoles, generally endowed with two engineers in their respective discipline, often hosting additional support staff during the planned dynamic phases of the mission or test objectives.
Trey Perryman
Direct for Orion Mission and Integration Systems to NASA Johnson
Perryman guides the assessment room of the Artemis II Orion mission alongside Jen Madsen, deputy director of planeic, power and Orion software.
With the crew on board, Orion will put more systems to the test, requiring more expertise to monitor the new systems that were not stolen before. To meet these needs and safe and safe flights from Orion to the Moon, NASA has officially opened the brand new Mission Control installation to accommodate the Orion mission assessment room on August 15.
During Artemis II, the evaluation room will operate in three -quarters of daily work, starting approximately 48 hours before takeoff. The room is equipped within 24 years throughout the mission of almost 10 days, until the spaceship has been secure safely inside the American navy ship which will recover it after splashing.
Another key function of the evaluation room is to collect and analyze the large amount of data that will produce during the flight, which will help inform the room team about the performance of the spacecraft.
“Data collection is extremely important,” said Perryman. “We will make an analysis and an evaluation of all the data that we have collected and compare it to what we expected from the space machine. Although a large part of this data comparison will take place during the mission, we will also do a more in -depth analysis after the end of the mission to see what we have learned. ”
If unforeseen situations occur during the mission, the mission assessment room has additional layers of ability to support any specific need. This includes various engineering media from various NASA centers, the integrated Lockheed Martin, the European Space Research and Technology Center of ESA test laboratory, etc.
Jen Madsen
Deputy Director of Avionic, Power and Orion Software
“We will see our spacecraft transporting our crew on the moon on these screens and still permanently learns all its capacities,” said Madsen.
The artemis II test flight will send the astronauts of NASA Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the astronaut of the Canadian space agency) Jeremy Hansen on the moon and refer them safely to them. This first crew flight as part of the NASA Artemis campaign will open the field so that NASA returns the Americans to the lunar surface and will help the agency and its business and international partners to prepare for future human missions in Mars.
