Welcome home! Splashdown completes Artemis I mission
After “skipping” through Earth’s atmosphere blazing in at 25,000 mph, an uncrewed Orion capsule successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday. Touching down at 12:41 p.m. EST, it marked the exclamation point of NASA’s nearly monthlong Artemis I test flight.
It all started at Kennedy Space Center in Florida with Orion’s dramatic and spectacular night-illuminating launch atop NASA’s 322-foot Space Launch System rocket on Nov. 16.
Sunday’s conclusion came after Orion’s lunar round trip spanning a total of 251⁄2 days and about 1.4 million miles.
Coincidentally, Orion’s splashdown occurred on the 50th anniversary of the touchdown on the moon of NASA’s last lunar mission, Apollo 17, according to NASA spokesperson Rob Navias.
NASA associate administrator, Cathy Koerner, said Sunday from Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center, “There’s a lot of energy in the room and it’s, it’s very familiar, but it’s also very different as we step into this next episode in human exploration.”
Orion punched through the atmosphere on a complex trajectory called a “skip reentry” experiencing temperatures of about 5,000 degrees in the process. It then skipped back out of the upper reaches of the atmosphere alleviating some of the heat, speed, and Gforces.
It then plunged back in for the final descent. Traveling at about 300 mph, parachutes deployed to slow the spacecraft’s descent to just 20 mph before splashing down and bobbing in the Pacific Ocean to await its retrieval by the landing and recovery team that was stationed nearby.
Chosen to avoid rough seas and winds associated with a cold front, the landing site off the coast of California near Guadalupe Island off Baja California was predetermined by Air Force weather specialists before the departure of the recovery team.
The primary recovery vessel the USS Portland, a U.S. Navy amphibious transport ship, and the landing and recovery team – composed of about 95 people from the Navy, the U.S. Air Force, NASA, and Lockheed Martin – deployed from San Diego on Wednesday to a holding position in the Pacific.
NASA’s team was preparing the capsule to be hauled aboard the recovery ship.