NASA'S Orion capsule zoomed through Earth's atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific ocean on Sunday, the US space agency confirmed, capping a 25-day voyage around the moon and back as part of NASA's first Artemis mission.
The splashdown capped a 25-day mission less than a week after passing about 79 miles above the moon in a lunar fly-by, and came about two weeks after reaching its farthest point in space, nearly 270,000 miles from Earth.
Orion blasted off on Nov. 16 from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop NASA's towering next-generation Space Launch System , now the world's most powerful rocket and the biggest NASA has built since the Saturn V of the Apollo era. By coincidence, the return to Earth of Artemis I unfolded on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 moon landing of Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on Dec. 11, 1972. They were the last of 12 NASA astronauts to walk on the moon during a total of six Apollo missions starting in 1969.
"It is our priority-one objective," NASA's Artemis I mission manager Mike Sarafin said at a briefing last week. "There is no arc-jet or aerothermal facility here on Earth capable of replicating hypersonic re-entry with a heat shield of this size."
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