Upcoming Artemis II Space Mission Has Multiple Yuma Proving Ground Connections

NASA announced the first crewed mission of the Artemis II will fly around the moon after an opportune launch window sometime between early February and the end of April.

The mission will culminate in the deployment of the Orion space capsule's parachutes, which were rigorously evaluated at U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, through multiple developmental tests between 2011 and 2018.

The mission's pilot is slated to be Astronaut Victor Glover, who witnessed multiple developmental tests of the Capsule Parachute Assembly System at the proving ground. Glover and his crewmates went into a prelaunch health stabilization, or quarantine, Jan. 23 in preparation for the mission.

Most people associate space travel with tremendous speed, but safe deceleration is just as important for the astronauts on board. A spacecraft must travel at approximately 20,000 mph to escape Earth's gravity. By contrast returning its occupants safely to the ground the same capsule needs to be decelerated from as fast as 24,500 mph to speeds slower than most people drive their cars on residential streets.

Meanwhile, the extreme friction generated as the capsule hurtles back into the Earth's atmosphere at such tremendous speed causes its exterior to heat to more than 4,000 degrees.

Safely landing under these conditions is a tremendous undertaking and large parachutes play an important role in accomplishing it. The Capsule Parachute Assembly System's cord is made of Kevlar, a strong synthetic fiber used in body armor; the change from steel was made following testing at Yuma Proving Ground. Each main parachute consists of 10,000 square feet of fabric. The system is designed to deploy sequentially, passing through two stages before fully opening. On reentry, two drogue parachutes deploy to slow the hurtling 10-ton capsule before three main parachutes bring it down to a languid landing speed of 17 mph.

Further, the parachute system is designed with redundancies to ensure a safe landing for astronauts, even in extreme scenarios such as two parachutes failing or a catastrophic mishap shortly after takeoff. In many of the tests at the proving ground, evaluators intentionally rigged one or more of the Capsule Parachute Assembly System's parachutes to not deploy, which tested if the remaining functioning chutes could withstand the additional stress of speed and mass that the failure would cause.

In addition to outfitting the test vehicle with far more instrumentation and cameras than would be possible if it were coming from space, testing over land at Yuma Proving Ground made recovery and examination of the parachutes easier than when the capsule lands in the ocean following a real space mission.

The years of hard work paid off. Following a Nov. 16, 2022, launch the uncrewed Orion took a 1.4-million-mile round-trip journey that took it past the moon, reentering the atmosphere and splashing down safely in the Pacific Ocean after the Capsule Parachute Assembly System deployed without a hitch Dec. 11, 2022.

Yuma Proving Ground has hosted developmental testing for NASA since the earliest days of the space program. The precursor to the lunar rover used during the last moon landings in 1971 and 1972, dubbed the "mobility test article," was tested at the proving ground in 1966. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the surface of the moon, visited the proving ground in 1971 to witness developmental testing of the AH-56 Cheyenne Attack Helicopter.