Historic moon mission concludes with splashdown of Orion capsule
The Artemis I mission - a 25-day uncrewed test flight around the moon meant to pave the way for future astronaut missions - came to an momentous end as NASA's Orion spacecraft made a successful ocean splashdown Sunday,The spacecraft finished the final stretch of its journey, closing in on the thick inner layer of Earth's atmosphere after traversing 239,000 miles between the moon and Earth. It splashed down at 12:40 p.m. ET Sunday in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico's Baja California.
"By dividing the heat and force of reentry into two events, skip entry also offers benefits like lessening the g-forces astronauts are subject to," according to Lockheed, referring to the crushing forces humans experience during spaceflight. The space agency's plans are to parlay the Artemis moon missions into a program that will send astronauts to Mars, a journey that will have a much faster and more daring reentry process.
On its trip, the spacecraft captured stunning pictures of Earth and, during two close flybys, images of the lunar surface and a mesmerizing "Earth rise.""Not an A-plus, simply because we expect things to go wrong. And the good news is that when they do go wrong, NASA knows how to fix them," Nelson said. But "if I'm a schoolteacher, I would give it an A-plus."
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