and military recovery team members aboard four helicopters and two backup ground vehicles are waiting just outside the capsule’s designated landing area on the Department of Defense’sin order to get to the capsule as quickly as possible once it touches down . The team’s goal is to get the capsule to a temporary clean room on the range as soon as possible to protect it from contamination from Earth’s environment.
The capsule will not be visible to the naked eye as it descends and lands because it is small – about the size of a large truck tire – and coming in during daylight hours onto an area that most people can’t access. There are no location sensors on the capsule, so the team will rely on aircraft and ground instruments to track its descent. Infrared instruments should be able to track the capsule’s heat signature when it’s still high in the sky. This heat comes from the capsule’s interaction with Earth’s atmosphere: Because it will be traveling thousands of miles per hour, the compression of the atmosphere will produce enough energy to envelop the capsule in a superheated ball of fire.