Nasa’s Orion capsule has splash-landed in the Pacific after completing a 2.25 million km test flight to orbit the moon, paving the way for the next generation of manned lunar missions.
The spaceship was launched aboard the Artemis 1 rocket on November 16th from the agency’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
It has since successfully orbited the moon, breaking the record for the furthest travelled by any spacecraft designed to carry humans by reaching more than 400,000km.
The capsule, which only had manikin passengers on board, passed within 129km of the far side of the moon, using lunar gravity as a slingshot for the 381,000km ride back to Earth.
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It also passed over the landing sites of Apollo 12 and 14.
But at 1,931km up, it was too high to make out the descent stages of the lunar landers or anything else left behind by astronauts more than 50 years ago.
The capsule would have been travelling at 40,000km/h – or 32 times the speed of sound – when it breached the Earth’s atmosphere, creating temperatures up to to 3,000 degrees – about half the temperature of the surface of the sun.
As it entered the atmosphere, Orion’s speed will have slowed down to about 523km/h before it deployed its 11 parachutes to slow down further to a splashdown speed of 32km/h or less.
It then completed a descent to a target area off Mexico’s Baja California where USS Portland was waiting to pick it up from the water.
It landed in the water at 5.40pm (GMT) after a journey of 25 days, 10 hours, 54 minutes and 50 seconds.
A Nasa spokesman said it was a “textbook” return to Earth.
The organisation posted on Twitter: “Splashdown. After traveling 1.4 million miles through space, orbiting the Moon, and collecting data that will prepare us to send astronauts on future #Artemis missions, the @NASA_Orion spacecraft is home.” – PA