Artemis II astronauts return home from record-breaking moon mission
Their 13-minute fiery plunge through the atmosphere concluded a historic mission that went deeper into space than anyone had flown before
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Artemis II space crew returns safely to Earth
The Artemis II capsule and its four-member crew streaked through Earth’s atmosphere and safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday after nearly 10 days in space, capping the first voyage by humans to the vicinity of the moon in over half a century.
Nasa’s gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, parachuted gently into the sea off the Southern California coast shortly after 5pm, concluding a mission that took the astronauts deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The Artemis II flight, travelling a total of 694,392 miles (1,117,515 km) across two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar fly-by some 252,000 miles away, was the debut crewed test flight in a series of Artemis missions that aim to start landing astronauts on the lunar surface starting in 2028.
The splashdown, under partly cloudy skies about two hours before sunset, was carried by live video feed in a Nasa webcast. “A perfect bull’s eye splashdown for Integrity and its four astronauts,” Nasa commentator Rob Navias said moments after the landing.
“We are stable one – four green crew members,” mission commander Reid Wiseman radioed just after splashdown, signalling the capsule was steady and that all four astronauts were in good shape.
It took Nasa and US Navy recovery teams less than two hours to secure the floating capsule and retrieve the four crew members – US astronauts Wiseman, 50, Victor Glover, 49, and Christina Koch, 47, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, 50. Nasa reported that a navy medical officer who briefly checked the astronauts aboard the capsule found them all to be healthy.