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We recently tested airspace technology that will enable drones to monitor and fight wildfires 24 hours a day. Learn more: go.nasa.gov/4aJzCne

NASA has further delayed the next two Artemis missions to the moon, pushing back the first crewed landing of the program to the middle of 2027. At a press conference Dec. 5, NASA leadership said they were delaying the Artemis 2 and 3 missions after finding the root cause of erosion of the Orion heat shield on the Artemis 1 mission two years ago. Under the revised scheduled, Artemis 2, which had previously been scheduled to launch in September 2025, is now set to launch in April 2026. That mission will send four American and Canadian astronauts around the moon on the first crewed flight of Orion. That will delay Artemis 3, which will feature the first crewed landing of the overall exploration campaign using SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. That mission, previously planned for September 2026, is now expected to take place in mid-2027. NASA revised that schedule after completing an investigation into the heat shield erosion seen on Artemis 1. Agency officials had said in October that they had determined what liberated the heat shield material but did not provide details on the cause or what NASA would do to correct it. The problem, said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, was linked to the “skip” reentry used by Orion, where the capsule dips in and out of the atmosphere to bleed off energy. More heat was retained than expected in the outer layers of the heat shield, forming gases that were trapped in the material. “This caused internal pressure to build up and led to cracking and uneven shedding of that outer layer,” she said. That conclusion was based on an extensive investigation and verified by an independent review team. “There were a lot of links in the error chain that accumulated over time that led to our inability to predict this in ground tests,” said Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office. That included changes in how the heat shield material, called Avcoat, was made, as well as changes in the geometry of the blocks of material. That was confirmed, he said, in portions of the Avcoat material that had the desired higher permeability that would allow the gases to escape. “In those places, we did not witness in-flight cracking, and that was the key clue for us.” NASA decided not to replace the completed heat shield for the Artemis 2 mission and will instead modify the reentry profile, including reducing the duration of the skip phase of the reentry. Those changes, he said should be sufficient so that any cracking does not lead to material breaking off, based on ground tests. #Orion #NASA #Artemis The Artemis 2 astronauts inspect their Orion spacecraft. (NASA)