NASA Regains Contact With Its Orion Spacecraft After Communication Loss

NASA's Orion spacecraft is now preparing to get home.

The space agency revealed that the Orion spacecraft continues to travel farther away from the Moon as it prepares to enter the orbit that will take it on its path back to Earth.

This preparation occurred after NASA lost communication with Orion due to a configuration error on the space agency's side of things.

NASA Orion Spacecraft Nov. 23 Status Details

NASA revealed in its blog post that its Orion spacecraft is readying itself to enter a distant retrograde orbit that would take it farther away from the Moon and begin its journey to return to Earth.

The space agency calls the orbit "distant" as it is at a high altitude from the surface of the Moon, and "retrograde" because Orion will travel around the Moon in the opposite direction the Moon travels around Earth.

As of press time, NASA said that Orion exited the Moon's gravitational sphere of influence on Nov. 22 at 9:49 AM CST. It is expected to reach its farthest distance from the Moon on Friday, Nov. 25, before entering the near-rectilinear halo orbit, the most fuel-efficient orbit used when traveling around the Moon.

This orbit is the same one NASA's CAPSTONE spacecraft is currently in. Meanwhile, Space.com reports that NASA expects Orion to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on Dec. 11.

However, the journey to reach this point in Orion's test was heart anxiety-inducing, to say the least. NASA previously said it suddenly lost contact with the spacecraft on Nov. 23 at 12:09 AM CST for unknown reasons. Thankfully, the NASA engineers were able to reconfigure the space agency's Deep Space Network on NASA's side and restore communication with the wayward spacecraft after 47 minutes.

The engineers are still investigating the cause of the communication loss, and what exactly happened, while downloading the data recorded on Orion during the incident to shed more light on what happened.

Thankfully, the communication loss had no impact on Orion, and the spacecraft remained in a healthy configuration.

Connected To Past Tests?

It is unknown if the communication loss is connected to the test of its Search Acquire and Track (SAT) mode developmental test objective NASA previously tested on Nov. 22.

NASA mentioned that it tested Orion's SAT mode to determine if the algorithm responsible for recovering and maintaining communication with NASA through its Deep Space Network after a temporary communication or power loss that reboots the spacecraft's hardware is working or not.

The test involves NASA experts switching Orion into SAT mode and attempting to restore communications after about 15 minutes.

Should it be a success, Orion's SAT mode will provide an important and reliable final option to its crew to fix a communication loss even after losing power temporarily.

NASA has yet to provide an update on whether its test of Orion's SAT mode is a success or not.