Have you ever wondered what it would be like to look out the window of a spacecraft that’s returning to Earth? Is it really like that scene in Apollo 13, where atmospheric reentry at around 20,000 miles per hour creates enough friction that your spacecraft heats up to almost the same temperature of the surface of the Sun? Well, wonder no more: NASA has released some video footage (embedded below) captured out of the windows of the Orion capsule as it returned to Earth during its test flight a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it’s sensational.
The video begins about 10 minutes before Orion splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California. When the video begins, Orion is still doing around 20,000 miles per hour, and is just about to hit the Kármán line — a point of demarcation in the Earth’s thermosphere, 100 kilometers up, where “outer space” officially begins and ends. Basically, the Kármán line is where the Earth’s atmosphere starts to get thick enough to cause friction — and thus, as you’ll see in the video, a truly marvelous display of super-heated plasma as Orion’s heat shield soaks up the massive amount of heat produced by drag.
While I strongly encourage you to watch the whole video, there’s no getting around the fact that the first two minutes are by far the most interesting — I mean, come on, there’s frickin’ magenta plasma! Basically, as the Earth’s atmosphere slows Orion down from 20,000 mph, the kinetic energy is converted into heat energy, which is then absorbed and mitigated by the heat shielding that protects about three quarters of Orion’s hull. As the atmosphere gets thicker, the temperature of the plasma continues to rise, changing colors from yellow to lavender to magenta — at which point the temperature is around 4,000 Fahrenheit (2,200 Celsius). Eventually, as the capsule slows from hypersonic speeds, the shielding cools and the color of the plasma changes back to yellow.
Read more about Orion’s first test flight, EFT-1
Following atmospheric reentry, Orion plummets towards the Earth for a couple more minutes, until around the 5:25 mark in the video when it deploys its first set of parachutes. Then, at around 6:25, the first set of parachutes is jettisoned and the main chutes are pulled out by some drogues. From about 7 minutes onward, it’s just a slow cruise down to the Pacific Ocean. The splashdown at the end, a few seconds before the video finishes, is pretty fun to watch.
All this occurred a couple of weeks ago, on December 5. Orion was scooped out of the water by the US Navy, deposited in San Diego, and was then transported all the way across the country, finally arriving at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on December 18. NASA and Lockheed Martin (who made the capsule) will now spend months analyzing Orion to make sure every aspect of the craft performed as intended. Assuming everything checks out (and it seems like the mission was executed perfectly), a second Orion capsule will be built and launched sometime in 2017 by the new Space Launch System rocket.
Now check out high-res photos from Orion’s first space flight