• The NASA images were taken by a high-resolution camera attached to the tip of the spacecraft’s solar panels.

• Orion, this Wednesday (7), made its last pass around the Moon on its way to Earth;

• The images show the spacecraft orbiting the moon and taking a picture on the far side of the satellite.

the capsule Orion On Wednesday (7), he made his last pass around the Moon on his way to Earth, and NASA It has released some of the best images of the spacecraft to date. The images, taken by a high-resolution camera attached to the tip of Orion’s solar panels, show the spacecraft orbiting the moon and taking pictures of the far side of the satellite.

The images Orion took on its first close pass of the moon were quite grainy and blown out, likely because they were taken with Orion’s Optical Navigation Camera and not the solar-panel-mounted GoPros. Other GoPro images have been overexposed, but it looks like NASA got the settings right with the latest series of images.

Obviously, satellite imagery was not the main objective of the Artemis I mission, but it is a public relations mission, as NASA has discovered on previous missions. It was a bit surprising that NASA didn’t show some high-resolution close-ups of the lunar surface when it first flew by.

Program director Howard Hu told reporters last week that Orion’s performance so far was “excellent.” The spacecraft was launched Nov. 15 as part of the Artemis 1 mission atop NASA’s powerful Space Launch System. Days earlier, the spacecraft completed a three-and-a-half-minute engine burn (the longest flight yet) to put it on course for a December 11th descent.

The next mission, Artemis II, is scheduled to launch in 2024 to carry astronauts on a trajectory similar to Artemis I without landing on the moon. Then, humans will finally set foot on the moon again with Artemis III, scheduled for release in 2025.