By Ghazali Ibrahim
NASA’s Artemis II mission has successfully returned to Earth, marking the end of a historic journey that saw astronauts travel around the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
The Orion spacecraft carrying four astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, concluding a nearly 10-day mission that covered about 695,000 miles.
The crew: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen were quickly recovered by U.S. Navy teams and confirmed to be in good health following the high-speed re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
During the mission, Artemis II set a new record for the farthest distance humans have travelled from Earth, reaching over 252,000 miles, surpassing the milestone set during the Apollo 13 mission in 1970.
The return phase was considered one of the most critical parts of the mission, as the spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at speeds approaching 25,000 miles per hour, enduring extreme temperatures before deploying parachutes for a controlled splashdown.
Artemis II is the first crewed mission in NASA’s Artemis programme and is widely seen as a major step toward future lunar exploration, including plans to land astronauts on the Moon later this decade.
The successful mission underscores renewed global momentum in space exploration and sets the stage for more ambitious deep-space missions, including potential crewed journeys to Mars.
