You can follow NASA’s epic Artemis 1 moon mission in real time after it takes off next week.
NASA will launch an Artemis 1 tracking website on Sunday (Aug. 28), the day before the mission’s liftoff. Artemis 1 will see the debut of the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket, which will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a roughly 40-day trip around the Moon and back.
The Artemis Live Orbit website will be announced on NASA’s Orion Twitter feed (opens in a new tab) a day before the first opportunity to launch Artemis 1, which arrives on Monday at morning (August 29), NASA officials said in a statement (opens in new tab).
“Knowing what the spacecraft is doing during the mission is already great, but now that Orion data can be visualized in all these different ways, it will be interesting to see what creative projects others come up with,” Richard Garodnick, an engineer at the L ‘engineering and systems development team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) mission control center, said in the Aug. 17 statement.
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The tracking website will provide live information from Orion’s sensors that are sent to NASA’s Mission Control Center at JSC. Data will begin to be transmitted about a minute after liftoff, the agency says, by separating the SLS interim cryogenic propulsion stage. Orion, once separated from the rocket, will provide a real-time feed of information on its own.
This information will include many mission milestones, the flight path, and Orion data such as temperature, distance traveled, and mission elapsed time.
A selection of state vectors, describing where Orion is at any given time in space and its movements, will be available for open source data reuse for tracking applications, data visualizations and other creative uses by third parties, NASA added.
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