Artemis II astronauts return safely to Earth after historic mission around the Moon
By Tanveer Ahmed :
A spacecraft carrying four astronauts from the Artemis II mission has safely returned to Earth after nearly ten days in space, completing the first human journey to the Moon’s vicinity in more than 50 years.
Nasa’s Orion capsule, named Integrity, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California shortly after 5pm local time on Friday. The landing, broadcast live by the US space agency, marked the end of a landmark mission that took the crew farther from Earth than any humans have travelled before.
The gumdrop-shaped capsule descended by parachute into the sea after a dramatic re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere. Recovery teams quickly moved in to secure the spacecraft and retrieve the astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of the United States, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
During the mission, the crew travelled about 694,000 miles (more than 1.1 million kilometres), completing two orbits of Earth before flying around the far side of the Moon at a distance of roughly 252,000 miles from the planet. The journey forms part of Nasa’s Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface later this decade.
The final moments of the mission involved a tense 13-minute descent through the atmosphere. As the capsule plunged towards Earth, friction heated its outer shell to around 5,000°F (2,760°C). A glowing layer of ionised gas briefly blocked radio contact with the astronauts — a normal but dramatic phase of re-entry — before communications were restored and parachutes deployed to slow the craft to about 15 miles per hour before splashdown.
Nasa and US Navy crews were expected to take about an hour to secure the capsule and assist the astronauts out before flying them to a nearby recovery vessel for medical checks.
The crew launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 1 April aboard Nasa’s Space Launch System rocket, embarking on a journey that carried them beyond the Moon and back. Their flight marked the first time astronauts had travelled to lunar distances since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s.
The mission also set several milestones. Victor Glover became the first Black astronaut to take part in a lunar mission, Christina Koch the first woman, and Jeremy Hansen the first non-American to fly on such a voyage.
At the furthest point of the mission, the astronauts were about 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing the distance record set by the crew of Apollo 13 in 1970.
Artemis II follows the uncrewed Artemis I test mission in 2022 and serves as a crucial rehearsal for future lunar landings. Nasa plans to send astronauts to the Moon’s surface again by 2028, more than half a century after the final Apollo landing in 1972.
The wider goal of the Artemis programme is to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon, which space agencies view as a stepping stone for eventual missions to Mars.
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