It had been a very long day for the crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission. But Victor Glover, the NASA astronaut who is the pilot aboard the spacecraft, did not seem tired at all.
Rather, he seemed almost giddy at the end of Wednesday as he took the controls of the Orion crew capsule from the computer and got to fly the spacecraft manually.
“It’s quite nice and very responsive,” Mr. Glover, a former Navy test pilot, told mission control. “And the camera is also better than what we were flying in the sim.” (Sim is short for simulator, a full-scale mock-up that allows astronauts to practice flying the spacecraft on Earth.)
This was part of an exercise conducted after the Orion spacecraft separated from the second stage of the Space Launch System rocket.
“I call it test driving the car,” Howard Hu, the Orion program manager, said during a news conference on Thursday.
During future Artemis missions, Orion will have to dock with lunar landers built by SpaceX and Blue Origin that are to take astronauts to the surface of the moon. There was no way to practice actually docking with the discarded rocket stage. But that object made a handy target for trying out some precise spacecraft maneuvering.
In the terminology of NASA, it was proximity operations, or prox ops, for short.
“We’re flying stuff that we need to fly on a future flight,” David Dannemiller, deputy manager for Orion’s guidance, navigation and control system, explained late on the NASA webcast. “So by being able to do it now, if we see any funnies in the data or decide we need to make any corrections, we have time to make those corrections before the Artemis III flight.”
During the exercise, Mr. Glover nudged Orion to within 10 meters, or 33 feet, of the rocket stage. The other Artemis II astronauts kept close watch to make sure that there would be no danger of a fender bender in orbit.
When the thrusters fired, “That little rumble is like a very slight rumble, like just driving over a little slightly rocky road,” Mr. Glover said.
He said that was different from the popping sounds that thrusters on the Russian Soyuz and SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft make.
Then he backed away and maneuvered Orion to get a side view of the rocket stage, noting one particular symbol affixed there.
“I can see the side docking target,” Mr. Glover said. “That is a good-looking American flag.”
After about an hour, the test was complete.
“Overall, guys, this flies very nicely,” Mr. Glover told mission control.
Mr. Dannemiller said the test provided crucial information about the Orion propulsion system that could not be obtained without going to space. That includes the cameras. In space, there are no air molecules for light to bounce off and diffuse.
“Cameras in space have historically had problems,” Mr. Dannemiller said. “The brights are very bright, and the darks are very dark.”
The tiny pulses of the thrusters were sometimes too slight to be measured by accelerometers on the spacecraft. “We’re doing very, very, very small maneuvers,” Mr. Dannemiller said. “They’re less than a 100th of a meter per second velocity change at the vehicle.”
The only way the astronauts could tell was by looking at the relative position of the rocket stage in front of them.
All of the planned maneuvers were performed in less than the allotted time. “We accomplished all the test objectives that we set out,” Mr. Hu said.
Other manual flying tasks are planned for later in the mission including pointing at a star and turning off some of the thrusters and testing whether a degraded control system still works well enough.
“That’s why we’re doing this,” Mr. Dannemiller said, “to get some of the system tests behind us before we fly the first dockings for real on Artemis III.”
Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.
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