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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news that impacts science and scientists today.
After a week-and-a-half journey to and around the Moon, the Artemis II crew splashed back to Earth off the coast of San Diego at 5:07 p.m. local time (8:07 p.m. ET) on 10 April.
“From the pages of Jules Vernes to a modern day mission to the Moon, a new chapter in the exploration of our celestial neighbor is complete,” said a NASA announcer as the astronauts splashed down. “Integrity’s astronauts, back on Earth.”
In a news conference on 9 April, the day before splashdown, NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya described what NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen will have accomplished upon arriving home.
“They will have traveled 400,000 miles. They will have seen what no living person has seen. They will have tested every system on the spacecraft in the environment it was built for. And they will have given us 10 days of data that will shape every mission that comes after,” he said.
Related
• Humanity Returns to the Moon with Artemis II
• NASA: Artemis II Mission
• Spaceship-to-Spaceship Call
In the same news conference, lead flight director Jeff Radigan described the approximately “13 minutes of things that have to go right” prior to splashdown: At 4:53 p.m. local time, the spacecraft entered a 6-minute communications blackout as plasmas formed around the spacecraft in the face of heat reaching 2,200 to 2,760 °C (4,000 to 5,000 °F) and a G level of 3.9. Then, Orion jettisoned its forward bay cover, deployed drogue parachutes at 22,000 feet above Earth, and deployed three more parachutes at 6,000 feet to slow the spacecraft before splashdown.
In their journey to go farther from Earth than humans have ever traveled, the astronauts tested the Orion spacecraft’s life-support, propulsion, and navigation systems; captured images of Earth and the Moon; and conducted several trajectory correction burns.
The world watched as the astronauts on the Orion spacecraft and the International Space Station held a spaceship-to-spaceship call, and as the crew called mission control to request that a lunar crater be named “Carroll” after Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Wiseman.
When the crew passed behind the Moon on 6 April, they entered a 40-minute planned communication blackout as the lunar surface blocked radio communication with Earth.
“You heard the word[s] ‘together,’ ‘togetherness’ a lot from our crew,” said NASA astronaut Victor Glover, from space, describing the blackout. “I really was hoping that, while we were waiting to get back into contact, that people could just feel that sense of togetherness, that we were all a crew on spaceship Earth.”
—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Associate Editor
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