A further journey in human history concluded Friday evening when the NASA Artemis II astronauts returned to Earth after a trip around the moon. The Orion spacecraft named Integrity splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego shortly after 5 p.m. Pacific Time, marking the end of a 10-day journey, more than 695,000 miles beyond the far side of the moon and back.
The four-person crew of Artemis II—commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen—traveled a greater distance from Earth than ever before. reaching 252,756 miles from our home planet.
“More importantly, we choose this time to challenge this generation and future generations to ensure that this record does not last long,” he said Canadian astronaut Hansen as a crew surpassed the previous record of 248,655 miles set during Apollo 13.
Integrity began to decline when the spacecraft hit Earth’s atmosphere at 24,000 miles per hour, entering a communications blackout and decelerating due to friction as its heat shield reached temperatures of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The plan was for the capsule to deploy two drogue parachutes to an altitude of about 22,000 feet, decelerate them to about 200 miles per hour, then deploy three main parachutes to about 6,000 feet. This would slow the spacecraft down to 20 miles per hour before it plunged into the ocean.
During their mission, the crew of Artemis II saw things that no human had ever seen before. Flying higher above the lunar surface than the Apollo missions, the astronauts were the first people to see the entire far side of the moon. They also witnessed a solar eclipse from close to the moon when the sun slipped behind the moon’s disk and illuminated it from behind.
“Humans may not have evolved to see what we see,” said NASA astronaut Glover during the eclipse. He and other crew members described the glow of light surrounding the moon while one side of the moon’s surface was illuminated by the earth. Venus, Mars, and Saturn shone among the stars. “It’s really hard to explain. It’s amazing.”
Artemis II launched on April 1 when the crew launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a 322-foot Space Launch rocket, the the most powerful vehicle ever carried by humans. After firing several booster engines and testing the spacecraft’s manual controls, the crew proceeded to fire an engine known as the translunar needle on the second day of the mission, which sent them into a lunar trajectory.
Over the next three days, the crew tested Orion’s spacecraft systems, practiced wearing their spacesuits, conducted additional course burns, relaunched the Orion capsule, and prepared for a lunar flyby around the far side of the moon. They also had trouble flushing sewage from the Orion capsule’s toilet into space.
“We definitely have to fix some pipes,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said he said during negotiations with employees.
At 12:41 a.m. ET on April 6, Artemis II entered the moon’s sphere of influence, where the moon’s gravitational pull overcomes Earth’s. That day, the crew approached the moon, flying up to 4,000 miles above the lunar surface. During the lunar flyby, the crew communicated with a team of scientists on the ground, before and after a communication blackout of about 40 minutes on the far side, to describe geological features such as craters and canyons.
Immediately after breaking the distance record, the crews suggested names for two small, unnamed craters on the moon. The first they named Integrity, after their spacecraft, and the second they named Carroll, in honor of the wife of commander Reid Wiseman, who died of cancer in 2020.
