Artemis II returns safely to Earth after 10-day mission
The Artemis II crew – Mission Specialist Christina Koch (top left), Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen (bottom left), Commander Reid Wiseman (bottom right), and Pilot Victor Glover (top right) – uses eclipse viewers, identical to what NASA produced for the 2023 annular eclipse and 2024 total solar eclipse, to protect their eyes at key moments during the solar eclipse they experienced during their lunar flyby. This was the first use of eclipse glasses at the Moon to safely view a solar eclipse. (Photo courtesy of NASA.)
The four crew members – Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover – of NASA's Artemis II moon mission returned to Earth this evening, with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at 8:07 p.m. ET.
Re-entry is always one of the riskiest parts of spaceflight, but that was particularly true for Artemis II, because Orion's heat shield – the critical layer that protects astronauts from extreme temperatures – had known design flaws.
Orion descended faster and at a steeper angle to minimize the time it was exposed to the highest heat.
During the 10-day Artemis II mission, the crew became the first humans to travel toward the moon in more than 50 years, and they set a new record for the farthest distance ever traveled from Earth. The astronauts were also the first to launch on NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket and to travel aboard the Orion spacecraft.
NASA plans to extract the astronauts from the Orion spacecraft one by one then fly them via helicopter to a U.S. Navy ship.
For updates, go to https://www.nasa.gov/.