NASA’s Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, off Mexico’s Baja California peninsula on December 11, 2022.
Key facts
- The Orion’s landing in the Pacific Ocean marked the end of the inaugural Artemis 1 lunar mission exactly 50 years after Apollo’s final moon landing.
- Artemis 1 performed a new landing technique called ‘skip entry’, designed to help the spacecraft accurately splash down at the landing site. Orion entered the Earth’s upper atmosphere and used the atmosphere and its lift to “skip” back outside the atmosphere only to re-enter once again.
- In its 35-day mission, the Orion passed about 127 km above the moon in a fly-by.
- Artemis 1 was an experimental mission, to check if the capsule can be trusted to ferry humans to the moon and back in future missions.
- The safe re-entry was critical to the success of the whole initiative.
- After its success, a crewed Artemis II will go around the moon and back by 2024, followed in a few years by Artemis III, which will see astronauts, including a woman, land on the moon.
- Artemis 1 is the first in a series of missions that are planned to not only take humans back to the Moon, but to also explore the possibilities of extended stay there, and to investigate the potential to use the Moon as a launch pad for deep space explorations.
