After more than a week in space, Artemis II is back on Earth.
The four-astronaut crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego just after 5:07 p.m. local time on Friday, April 10. The team included NASA commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Their return capped a mission that sent humans farther from Earth than ever before. During the flight, the Artemis II crew passed the record of 248,655 miles from Earth that had been set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970, according to NASA.
The spacecraft, Orion, hit the top of Earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of 400,000 feet around 4:53 p.m. That was followed by an expected six-minute communications blackout caused by plasma building up around the capsule.
During that blackout, Orion reached its top speed of about 24,661 miles per hour, more than 30 times the speed of sound. The capsule also went through peak heating, with the exterior facing temperatures of around 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
When communication resumed with Wiseman, people in Houston cheered. At that point, the crew was about 157,000 feet above Earth and a little more than five minutes from splashdown.
A series of parachutes then deployed before the capsule hit the water at about 19 miles per hour.
The crew did not land on the moon. Artemis II was a test flight aimed at helping NASA move toward returning humans to the moon’s surface in the next two years.
The astronauts also captured images of the far side of the moon during the mission.
In the hours before splashdown, attention was fixed on Orion’s heat shield. NASA had previously said the shield was flawed, according to The New York Times. NASA developed a modified path for the Artemis II mission to keep the crew safe during re-entry.
It has been more than 50 years since astronauts last went to the moon. NASA’s last moon expedition, Apollo 17, took place in 1972.
Another future moon mission is still in development and could theoretically launch as soon as 2028.
Patty Casas Horn, deputy lead for Mission Analysis and Integrated Assessments at NASA, told CNN earlier this year that the focus of Artemis II was on the people aboard the spacecraft.
“We will get to landing on the moon, but Artemis II is really about the crew,” Horn said.
Wiseman also framed the mission as part of a longer plan for human activity around the moon. He told Time that he and the other astronauts were “taking the next right step in a sustained lunar presence” by flying Artemis II.
“The important thing about being first,” he added, “is that there’s a second, third, fourth, and more.”
Artemis II brought together three NASA astronauts and one astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency for the flight. Glover served as pilot, Koch as mission specialist, Wiseman as commander, and Hansen represented Canada on the crew.
Their return ended a mission that combined record-setting distance, a trip around the moon, and a high-speed re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule dropped from 400,000 feet at entry to 157,000 feet when communications returned, then came down under parachutes before splashing into the Pacific.
NASA hopes the mission will help set up a human return to the moon’s surface by 2028. “The important thing about being first,” Wiseman told Time, “is that there’s a second, third, fourth, and more.”
📸 Credit: NASA
