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VIDEO: Orion’s heat shield arrives at MSFC
Christopher Pilny for redOrbit.com – @NotRealChainsaw
Last week, redOrbit was afforded the (insane) opportunity to tour NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. So, understanding you don’t get many opportunities like this, we brought along our videographer who captured the entire thing. We’ll be rolling out the footage over the next few weeks.
One of the coolest aspects of the tour–and really we were very fortunate to see it, thanks to a snow-induced-rescheduling–was the heat shield from Orion’s Exploration Flight Test-1. Launched on December 5th, 2014, it returned to Earth a few hours later after reaching an altitude of 3,600 miles and orbiting the planet twice. On its re-entry it reached temperatures of 4,000 degrees F, which is a lot, but is really thrown into light when you consider lava sits comfortably around 2,000 degrees F.
Re-entry is balmy, to say the least.
But enough from us: Check out the video to get all the Orion heat shield facts. And what the test flight meant for our #JourneyToMars moving forward.
And stay tuned for more from our visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center.
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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113356967/orions-heat-shield-returns-redorbit-tours-nasas-marshall-space-flight-center-032315/
