After nearly a 10-day mission circling the moon — at times passing through an eclipse and reaching farther from Earth than any humans before them — the four-person Artemis II crew made a dramatic return to Earth Friday night. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego at 8:07 p.m., riding inside NASA’s Orion capsule.
The crew shared a group hug inside Orion after splashdown while recovery teams worked to secure the spacecraft. The Navy ship USS John P. Murtha was stationed near the splashdown zone to assist with retrieval and crew transfer.
To survive reentry, the capsule endured predicted peak heating of roughly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and slowed from about 25,000 miles per hour — more than 30 times the speed of sound — to roughly 19 mph before hitting the water. That roughly 13-minute descent from the top of the atmosphere is an intense, high-temperature deceleration that crew members have likened to riding a brief fireball through the sky. Victor Glover emphasized that the risky, fiery return is vital: the spacecraft must bring the mission’s experimental and observational data safely home.
During the flight, the four crew members looped around the far side of the moon on April 6, photographing and observing the lunar surface as they went. The images, instrument readings and other data collected on the mission will now be transferred to teams on the ground for analysis.
The successful splashdown concludes the Artemis II crew’s historic trip and returns both the astronauts and the mission’s scientific returns to engineers and researchers back on Earth.