NASA’s Artemis II crew returns back home as 10-day historic Moon mission ends

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Florida: NASA’s Artemis II crew has successfully returned from the moon with a splashdown in the Pacific ocean on Friday (local time) off the coast of California, completing their 10-day journey in the space, said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The mission marks the first time in over 50 years that humans have travelled this far into deep space.

“Welcome home Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy!” said NASA in a post on X (previously Twitter), while also sharing a video of the splashdown. “The Artemis II astronauts have splashed down at 8:07pm ET (0007 UTC April 11), bringing their historic 10-day mission around the Moon to an end.”

The four crew members Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen have safely returned back from moon and they are “stable and green”, informed the space agency. The astronauts will be helped by the NASA and the US military in leaving the bobbing capsule, following which they will be flown to a recovery ship off the Pacific coast near San Diego.

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The Artemis II mission has broken the record for the farthest distance travelled by humans from Earth, breaking the Apollo 13 mission’s record of 248,655 miles.

Artemis II is NASA’s first crewed test flight in the Artemis campaign.

As per the official website of NASA, there are five main priorities for Artemis II. These included the ability of systems and teams to sustain the flight crew in the flight environment, and through their return to Earth; demonstrate systems and operations essential to a crewed lunar campaign; retrieve flight hardware and data, assessing performance for future missions; demonstrate emergency system capabilities and validate associated operations to the extent practical, such as abort operations and rescue procedures, as needed and complete additional objectives to verify subsystems and validate data.

Artemis II marks the first crewed mission around the moon in more than 50 years, carrying four astronauts farther into space than any humans have travelled in history.

Also Read: Artemis II Crew Reaches ‘Halfway’ Mark In Their Return Journey To Earth: NASA

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