Splashdown of Artemis II astronauts concludes 10-day moon mission
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 5 p.m. Pacific Time, concluding a mission that took the astronauts deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The Artemis II flight, traveling a total of 694,392 miles (1,117,515 kilometers) across two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar flyby 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.
Advertising by Adpathway
