Artemis II crew returns
NASA announced the Artemis II astronauts have returned safely to Earth after a record-setting lunar mission that completed outbound, lunar flight and recovery phases. The mission closure is now public and NASA described it as the first crewed Orion flight to return after traveling farther than prior missions (nasa.gov). JPL monitored the mission from its Space Flight Operations Facility and tracked DSN signal acquisition during reentry (x.com).
NASA’s Artemis II astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific on April 10, ending humanity’s first crewed trip around the Moon since 1972. (nasa.gov) NASA said Orion landed at 8:07 p.m. Eastern on Friday west of California after launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. Eastern on April 1. The crew was Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. (nasa.gov) The flight lasted 9 days, 1 hour, and 32 minutes, and NASA said the crew reached 248,655 miles from Earth on April 6, passing the Apollo 13 distance record set in 1970. NASA called it the farthest humans have traveled from Earth. (nasa.gov) Artemis II was the first crewed flight of Orion, the capsule NASA is building for missions beyond low-Earth orbit, where spacecraft circle relatively close to the planet. NASA flew Orion without astronauts on Artemis I in 2022; Artemis II added a four-person crew for a lunar flyby and return. (nasa.gov) The mission was a test flight, not a landing attempt. NASA said the point was to verify Orion’s life-support, navigation, communications, and reentry systems with astronauts aboard before later Artemis missions try to put crews on the Moon’s surface. (nasa.gov) Keeping contact with Orion required two separate space communications systems. NASA’s Near Space Network handled launch and near-Earth phases, while the Deep Space Network — a set of giant radio antennas in California, Spain, and Australia — took over after Orion headed toward the Moon. (jpl.nasa.gov, jpl.nasa.gov) The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California runs the Deep Space Network, and its Space Flight Operations Facility monitored signal acquisition during reentry as Orion came back through Earth’s atmosphere. JPL’s public Deep Space Network pages describe the system as NASA’s link to spacecraft operating far from Earth. (jpl.nasa.gov, eyes.jpl.nasa.gov) NASA said the crew returned to Johnson Space Center in Houston on April 11 and reunited with their families a day after splashdown. The agency is using Artemis II to set up later missions in the Artemis campaign, which NASA says is aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon and preparing for missions to Mars. (nasa.gov, nasa.gov)
