Houston : The four Artemis II astronauts, returning from the world’s first crewed moon voyage in over half a century, hurtled back toward Earth on Friday aboard their gumdrop-shaped Orion spacecraft, headed for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off Southern California.
The finale to NASA’s celebrated 10-day mission was expected to begin with separation of Orion’s crew capsule from its service module, followed by a fiery re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere and a six-minute radio blackout before the capsule parachutes into the sea.
If all goes well, U.S. astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will end up bobbing safely in the ocean aboard their Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, shortly after 8 p.m. ET (0000 GMT) off the coast of San Diego.
The quartet blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 1, lofted into an initial Earth orbit by NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket before sailing on around the far side of the moon, venturing deeper into space than any humans before them.
The Orion spacecraft is expected to enter into the atmosphere at some 25,000 miles per hour (40,235 kph), with temperatures outside the capsule are expected to soar to around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius).
At the flight’s peak, the crew reached a point 252,756 miles from Earth, exceeding the previous record of roughly 248,000 miles set in 1970 by the crew of Apollo 13.
