NASA’s Artemis II Astronauts have safely touched down on Earth after completing a landmark Moon mission — the first crewed flight beyond low-Earth orbit in over 50 years. The crew successfully completed a parachute landing on Friday in the Pacific Ocean after a high-speed re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere.
Recovery teams were waiting off the coast of California to retrieve them after their splashdown at 5:07 pm Pacific Time (00:07 GMT). All crew members will now undergo medical checks before returning to the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The crew consisted of NASA Astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
They spent ten days in space after lifting off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center last week, travelling farther from Earth than any humans in decades. They looped around the far side of the Moon, testing equipment in deep space, before propelling back to Earth. The mission was the first crewed flight to the Moon since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.
Artemis II is seen as a critical test flight for future Moon missions, particularly Artemis III, which aims to land Astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo era.
According to officials, the data collected will be analysed by engineers to assess the requirements needed to send humans back to the Moon. During the journey, the crew reported in vivid detail features of the lunar surface and later witnessed a solar eclipse as well as meteorite impacts.
Mission commander Wiseman said, “What we really hoped in our souls is that we could, for just a moment, have the world pause — and remember that this is a beautiful planet in a very special place in our universe. We should all cherish what we have been gifted.”
Follow us
