SANDUSKY, OHIO — Testing is fully underway on the Orion spacecraft for the upcoming Artemis I test flight mission at NASA’s Plum Brook Station testing facility in Sandusky, Ohio. The Orion crew capsule, integrated with its European Service Module, is currently inside the facility’s Space Environments Complex undergoing thermal vacuum tests in the largest thermal vacuum chamber in the world.
“We got everything closed up right before Christmas and pumped down the chamber,” said Nicole Smith, Orion testing Project Manager at Plum Brook. “We are about a third of the way through the test now for thermal vacuum, and things are going very well.”
The Artemis I mission will be the second uncrewed test of the Orion spacecraft, but the first to launch the vehicle atop NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The launch will send Artemis I on a mission to orbit the Moon and return to Earth. The mission is currently scheduled for launch sometime in 2021.
The Artemis I Orion spacecraft left Kennedy Space Center and arrived at Mansfield Ohio’s Lahm airport aboard NASA’s Super Guppy on November 25. It was unloaded from the aircraft and transported along a 41-mile route to Plum Brook Station the following day. Officials from the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland worked with the Ohio Department of Transportation and local utility companies to raise more than 700 overhead power lines along the spacecraft’s route through northeast Ohio to the Plum Brook facility.
A more than $150 million upgrade to testing facilities at Plum Brook over the last decade prepared the testing station for the arrival of Orion.
Upon its long-awaited arrival, the spacecraft was unpacked from its transportation equipment, tilted upright by a device aptly referred to as a “verticator”, and surrounded by a specially designed Heat Flux system which looks like a metal cage in the outline of the spacecraft. The Heat Flux system provides the heating portion of the thermal test, up to 300 degrees F.
“We next moved it over to the cryo floor, got everything bolted down, and moved the cryo floor over into the thermal vacuum chamber,” Smith said. “Once we were in there, there was a ton of work we had to do in hooking up all the spacecraft flight instrumentation, the ground test instrumentation, and the facility instrumentation. A ton of wiring in there. Lots of inspections between the folks at NASA, Lockheed, and ESA (European Space Agency) and Airbus, doing inspections on all the hardware.”
Lockheed is the prime contractor for Orion, and ESA, through contractor Airbus, is responsible for the European Service Module (ESM), which supplies electricity, propulsion, thermal control, air and water to Orion.
The spacecraft and Heat Flux system were then surrounded by a cryo shroud that would provide the cold portion of the tests, down to -250 degrees F. The vacuum chamber’s giant doors were closed, the chamber pumped down to space vacuum conditions, and the tests began.
“We have completed cold cycle #1,” Smith said. “We did the nominal chill-to-Sun configuration, when the spacecraft is turned and traveling away from the Sun, which is a pretty common position it will be in. That included depressurization of the crew module cabin down to about 1 psi. We also performed a cold stress eclipse case, and at that point we did a spacecraft performance test, and the spacecraft performed beautifully.”
The engineering teams at Plum Brook will next do a hot cycle in the chamber and do a thermal balance test, which verifies the spacecraft’s performance at temperatures with an additional margin of what is expected during flight thermal conditions. In addition, the teams will do some testing that simulates the spacecraft conditions for the crewed Artemis II mission.
“We will also do a thermal balance with Artemis II heat flows,” Smith said, “because we have a little more hardware in the spacecraft for Artemis II and you have people in there, so you’ll have more heat in the crew module that you’ll have to be able to expel. So we will practice that by putting some heat through the facility systems into the spacecraft.”
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