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The Orion’s Heat Shield Gets a Scorching on Re-entry
Larry Gagliano, Orion project manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, photographed in front of the spaceship’s heat shield. Credit: Lee Roop/AL.com
Yes, she’s a little worse for wear, isn’t she? But then again, that’s what atmospheric re-entry and 2200 °Celsius (4000 °Fahrenheit) worth of heat will do to you! Such was the state of the heat shield that protected NASA’s Orion Spaceship after it re-entered the atmosphere on Dec. 5th, 2014. Having successfully protected the craft during it’s test flight, the shield was removed and transported to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where it arrived on March. 9th.
Since that time, a steady stream of NASA employees have been coming by the facility to get a look at it while engineers collect data and work to repair it. In addition to being part of a mission that took human-rated equipment farther out into space than anything since the Apollo missions, the heat shield is also living proof that NASA is restoring indigenous space capability to the US.
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Read the rest of The Orion’s Heat Shield Gets a Scorching on Re-entry (600 words)
© mwill for Universe Today, 2015. |
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/119392/the-orions-heat-shield-gets-a-scorching-on-re-entry/
