Houston ¨C 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 calm seas off the Southern California coast shortly after 5:07 p.m. Pacific Time, concluding a mission that four days prior took the astronauts 405,000 kilometers?away from Earth, deeper into space than anyone had flown before.
The Artemis II flight, traveling a total of 1,117,515 km?in two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar flyby, was the debut ?crewed test flight in a series of Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface starting in 2028.
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