NASA’s Orion Control Room Prepares for Artemis II Lunar Mission

NASA's Artemis program is getting ready for Artemis II, the next mission that will use the Orion spacecraft to transport humans around the Moon. For the first time since the Apollo era, humans will venture outside of low Earth orbit during the 10-day Artemis II mission. NASA is working to send people back to the moon with Artemis II. NASA has established a new Orion Mission Evaluation Room (MER) at Johnson Space Center to support this mission. Teams of engineers will work in this room to keep an eye on Orion's systems while it is in flight. This facility, which is manned 24/7, will contribute to the crew's safety.

Purpose and Function of the Orion Control Room

According to NASA, the Orion Mission Evaluation Room (MER) acts as a real-time engineering support hub for the Artemis II mission while NASA's flight controllers pilot Orion from the main control room. The MER team compares live telemetry to the spacecraft's expected performance and troubleshoots any anomalies. If problems arise, MER can coordinate help from other NASA centers or Orion's industry partners to resolve them. The room also collects all flight data; engineers will study this telemetry afterward to see how Orion performed and guide future Artemis missions.

Design, Technology and People in Orion's Control Room

Physically, the Orion control room is a state-of-the-art annex to NASA's mission control center. It houses 24 console stations, each with multiple monitors, and will be staffed around the clock during Artemis II. Each console is usually manned by two experts, and all of Orion's major systems have dedicated engineers monitoring them. Staff from NASA work alongside engineers from Lockheed Martin, the European Space Agency and Airbus. The room's design is modern — even featuring hexagonal ceiling lights — highlighting Orion's advanced technology. In effect, the MER brings Orion's engineering brain trust under one roof, ensuring experts watch over every aspect of the flight.

Comments

CSIRO Uses Quantum AI to Revolutionize Semiconductor Design

Researchers at Australia's CSIRO have achieved a world-first demonstration of quantum machine learning in semiconductor fabrication. The quantum-enhanced model outperformed conventional AI methods and could reshape how microchips are designed. The team focused on modeling a crucial—but hard to predict—property called “Ohmic contact” resistance, which measures how easily current flows where metal meets a semiconductor. They analysed 159 experimental samples from advanced gallium nitride (GaN) transistors (known for high power/high-frequency performance). By combining a quantum processing layer with a final classical regression step, the model extracted subtle patterns that traditional approaches had missed. Tackling a difficult design problem According to the study, the CSIRO researchers first encoded many fabrication variables (like gas mixtures and annealing times) per device and used principal component analysis (PCA) to shrink 37 parameters down to the five most important ones. ...

Hubble Uncovers Multi-Age Stars in Ancient Cluster, Reshaping Galaxy Origins

Astronomers call ancient star clusters like NGC 1786 “time capsules” for their galaxy, preserving some of its oldest stars. A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offers an unprecedented close-up of this dense cluster 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble's data show that NGC 1786 contains stars of different ages – a surprising find, since such clusters were once thought to hold a single stellar generation. This multi-age discovery is reshaping our view of how galaxies built their first stars, and suggests more complex early history. Mixed-Age Stars in a Galactic Time Capsule According to the official source, this Hubble image shows the globular cluster NGC 1786, a ball of densely packed stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers captured this picture as part of a program comparing ancient clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies (like the LMC) with clusters in our own Milky Way. The surprising discovery is th...

A Planet with a Death Wish: How HIP 67522 b Is Forcing Its Star to Explode

Scientists have caught a planet with a death wish, which is an alien world, orbiting very near to its star, and so speedy that it is causing the star to go to its death with bursting explosions. HIP 67522 b is the planet, and it is of the same size as Jupiter with a seven-day orbit around its host star. These orbits are disturbing the magnetic field of the star and causing enormous blasting eruptions to blow back the planet and make it wrinkled. This is the first time that a planet is influencing the host star, as the astronomers reported in a study published on July 2, 2025, in the Journal Nature. A Planet with a Death Wish: HIP 67522 b's Fiery Orbit As per the study by NASA, Ekaterina Ilin, the first author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said that the planet was observed to trigger the energetic flares. It has been predicted by the scientists that the waves are setting off explosions that are going to happen. Magnetic Chaos: P...

Kartavya Kant Tiwari

Search This Blog