This weekend, NASA’s Orion spacecraft will be hunting down and studying our solar system’s most famous comet!
Orion is the next-generation spacecraft that will eventually take humans to deeper parts of space. And this Saturday, November 25th, it’ll be making its first Earth flyby as it circles around us on a gravity tether system. On Sunday and Monday it’ll be doing some science on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
So what does this all mean? Orion is NASA’s next-generation spacecraft designed to take humans deeper into space. It’ll be taking astronauts around the Moon and eventually, to Mars. It’ll also carry loads of science instruments, including a mass spectrometer that can detect all the molecules in a comet. Scientists will use this information to learn more about comets and how they interact with our solar system and how our solar system evolved.
For now, it’s still flying on top of the Space Launch System rocket – which lifts off for its first flight ever in 2018 — but when it finally does take off again it’ll do so with all its science gear attached.
You can check out Orion’s mission on NASA TV. Orion’s first Orion on-line tracking pass will occur at 12:00 PM EDT (16:00 UTC) on Sunday, Nov. 25th, and the second pass is at 4:00 AM (08:00 UTC) Monday, Nov. 26th. The passes are available here .
So for now you can track it as it circles around our planet and try to take pictures of it through a telescope. The best time to do so is probably this weekend between 9 a.m. Saturday and 6 p.m Sunday EST in the Northern Hemisphere or between 8 p.m Friday and 4 p.m. Saturday EST in the Southern Hemisphere.
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