A camera on one of the Orion spacecraft’s solar arrays captured this view of the moon, with distant Earth in the background a quarter-million miles away. Credit: NASA TV / Spaceflight Now
NASA’s unpiloted Orion spacecraft fired its main engine for two-and-a-half minutes Monday just before the capsule soared 81 miles from the surface of the moon, completing a flyby maneuver to bend its trajectory toward a distant orbit for more testing ahead of future lunar missions with astronauts.