On Sunday, the unmanned Orion spacecraft of NASA completed the first mission of the Artemis lunar programme, travelling around the moon and returned, exactly 50 years to the day after the last Apollo moon landing.
At 9:39 a.m. PST (1739 GMT), the gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, carrying a simulated crew of three sensor-equipped mannequins, was scheduled to parachute into the Pacific Ocean close to Guadalupe Island, off the coast of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.
Orion was nearing the end of its 25-day mission less than a week after doing a lunar fly-by and approximately two weeks after travelling about 270,000 miles (434,500 km) beyond Earth to its farthest point in space.
The capsule was planned to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 miles per hour (39,400 kph), or more than 30 times the speed of sound, after ejecting the service module housing its primary rocket system, for a blazing 20-minute descent to the ocean.
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