Wow! Orion spacecraft captures Earth and Moon live (video)
You can watch our planet and moon glide by on a real spaceship live.
NASA is streaming incredible video views from Artemis 1 right now please Orion spacecraft.which is close to 270,000 miles (435,000 kilometers) away Earth today (November 28). Orion flies in a far retrograde lunar orbit, meaning it is far from the Moon and orbits opposite the Moon’s path around Earth.
You can follow the live views month mission in real time through this live channel (opens in a new tab) from IBM, courtesy of NASA’s Orion camera recordings.
Epic views aren’t just inspiration in space. Videos and photos from the mission will also inform future Artemis program ventures. NASA wants to be sure the spacecraft is ready to pilot humans for future trips to the moon, and the next two in line will Artemis 2 orbiting the moon in 2024 or so, and Artemis 3 bring humans to the surface in 2025 or 2026.
In the photos: Spectacular views of the debut of NASA’s Artemis 1 rocket to the moon
The new footage is the highest resolution live from the Moon to date, though there’s plenty Apollo program missions broadcast from this region in the 1960s and 1970s.
Perhaps the most famous example was the Christmas Eve broadcast from Apollo 8 December 24, 1968, which featured black-and-white footage of the moon when NASA astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to walk around the moon.
Numerous scientific spacecraft have captured Earth from even greater distances, although these views have not been broadcast live. An often-cited example is “pale blue dot” picture (named after a quote from Carl Sagan), made by NASA Voyager 1 probe in 1990. Voyager 1 was above the plane of the solar system and outside the planet Neptune when he took the picture.
Orion is scheduled to return to Earth on Dec. 11, landing off the Pacific coast of California, assuming all stages go according to plan.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
https://www.space.com/artemis-1-orion-spacecraft-earth-moon-live-view Wow! Orion spacecraft captures Earth and Moon live (video)
