HOUSTON — Where is NASA’s Orion spacecraft? You can follow along as it journeys on its first mission around the moon using the Artemis Real-time Orbit Website, or AROW, to track its flight as it happens.
During Artemis I, Orion will travel 40,000 miles beyond the moon in the first integrated flight test with the Space Launch System rocket, according to NASA. Using AROW, anyone can pinpoint where Orion is and track its distance from the Earth, distance from the moon, mission duration, and more.
According to NASA’s website, AROW visualizes data collected by sensors on Orion and sent to the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston during its flight. It will provide constant real-time information.
“This is a really powerful way to engage with the mission and understand the scope of what NASA is trying to accomplish with Artemis I,” said Seth Lambert, the Orion programmer who created AROW.
Users can also view key mission milestones, and characteristics on the moon, including information about landing sites from the Apollo program, NASA said.
“Knowing what the spacecraft is doing during the mission is already cool, but now that Orion’s data can be visualized in all these different ways, it will be interesting to see what creative projects others come up with,” said Richard Garodnick, an engineer on the mission control center system engineering and development team at Johnson.