The four astronauts successfully landed back to Earth in the early hours of Friday night, marking the completion of their nine day mission to the moon in over 50 years.
This bcoming part of a crewed space flight that set a new record for the most distant travel humans have ventured from the Earth.
After a successful mission, the Orion spacecraft, codenamed as Integrity, landed in the Pacific Ocean about 40 to 50 miles away from the shore of San Diego at 8:07 pm EDT.
The landing process was slowed down with 11 parachutes, from an estimated speed of 300 miles per hour to under 20.
The astronauts who flew on board, namely Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and astronaut Jeremy Hansen from Canada’s Space Agency, travelled 694,000 miles from launch until landing.
Rick Henfling, the entry flight director, said that the spacecraft reached a top speed of 24,664 miles per hour during re entry, hit its flight path angle target within 0.4% and landed less than a mile from where it was supposed to splash down
As superheated plasma surrounded the capsule on its way down, it lost communication for about six minutes. This was a tense time for mission controllers in Houston.
One of the highlights of the mission occurred on April 6 when the crew traveled as far away from the Earth as 252,756 miles, breaking the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 by over 4,000 miles.
In addition, they were the first people ever to see parts of the far side of the Moon without instruments as well as witness a solar eclipse from outside the Moon’s orbit, an experience which was likened by Glover to “looking unreal.”
The team had several other firsts, including Glover who became the first black person to circle the moon, Koch, the first woman to do so, and Hansen, the first non American to travel this route.
Aside from being a spectacle, the mission was important because it gave NASA the chance to test some critical features of the Orion spacecraft before its future missions of taking crews all the way to the Moon’s surface.
For instance, due to a problem involving the craft’s heat shield the agency chose to modify the craft’s entry into the atmosphere, moving from a skip entry to a steeper one.
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This was according to Howard Hu, NASA’s Orion Programme Manager, who referred to the success as “the beginning of a new era of human exploration.”
The current goal is a crewed lunar landing during Artemis IV, which NASA aims to accomplish by 2028.
Hansen, while the team was behind the moon and therefore unable to communicate with Earth, issued a challenge to those watching at home. “We’re going to need future generations to break our record.”
