A 'very intense' six minutes of silence

Rebecca MorelleScience editor, at mission control As the spacecraft plunges into the dense atmosphere, plasma - superheated charged particles - will build up around it. This will block the spacecraft’s signals for about six minutes during the riskiest part of the re-entry. We visited the Orion capsule’s Mission Evaluation Room yesterday where the spacecraft is continuously monitored and spoke to Orion’s programme manager Howard Hu. He told us that six minutes of silence would be very intense. “I