Artemis II already had a place in history assured before it even hit the water, but its closure gives the mission a different dimension. Orion has splashed down off the coast of San Diego (United States) and with this has culminated a ten-day trip that has returned astronauts to the vicinity of the Moon for the first time since 1972. What we have seen has not only been a round trip flight around our satellite, but also the validation in real conditions of a ship, a crew and a roadmap with which NASA and its international partners want to go further than ever.
The key moment has arrived at 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10, equivalent to 2:07 a.m. on April 11 in Spanish peninsular time. With this splashdown, Orion’s flight sequence is closed and a less visible, but equally measured phase begins: recovery in the ocean. We are not just talking about a capsule touching the water, but about the point at which a maneuver calculated to the minute gives way to helicopters, military means, medical checks and transfer of the crew out of the vehicle.
Artemis II has made history: the most difficult return culminates over the Pacific
The most delicate part was not the lunar flyby, but the return home. To return safely, Orion had to enter the atmosphere under the right conditions, with heat shield exposed after separating from the service module and prepared to withstand extreme conditions: intense friction, plasma around the capsule and a communications outage expected for six minutes. NASA had further explained that, in a nominal profile, the crew could withstand up to 3.9 G. Everything in this phase depended on physics, engineering and timing being exactly where they needed to be.
The US space agency communicated this sequence in EDT time, but to better follow the outcome from Spain it is advisable to transfer it to peninsular time, where everything happened already in the early morning of April 11.
- 01:33: service module separation and heat shield exposure (completed)
- 01:37: final adjustment of entry path (completed)
- 01:53: start of upper atmosphere re-entry and start of communications blackout (completed)
- 02:03: opening of drogue parachutes at high altitude (filled)
- 02:04: deployment of three main parachutes to reduce descent speed (completed)
- 02:07: Orion splashdown off San Diego (completed)
- Before 04:07: crew recovery and transfer to support ship (earring)
As we say, from this moment on the recovery device that NASA has deployed together with US military personnel off the coast of California comes into play. According to the sequence planned by the agency, the crew must be extracted from the capsule and transferred by helicopter to the USS John P. Murtha, where the first medical evaluations after ten days of mission.
If we look at the mission as a whole, Artemis II leaves several well-defined milestones. It was the first manned flight beyond Earth’s orbit since 1972, it completed a lunar flyby without landing on the moon and established a new distance record for humans by exceeding 400,000 kilometers from Earth, above the Apollo 13 mark.
In between so much hard data, Artemis II has also left small scenes capable of becoming fixed in the collective memory. There are the images of the hidden side of the Moon taken by the crewcaptures of a solar eclipse or video calls from deep space. And then there is the most unexpected detail of all, the one that gave the mission a touch of color in the middle of the institutional solemnity: a jar of Nutella appearing floating in the ship during one of the broadcasts.
What comes next helps you better measure what you just finished. NASA now faces a demanding calendar phase for the next stages of the Artemis program, with a new mission already in preparation and with the focus on the operations that must support a future lunar landing. The next test will seek to advance that architecture with new maneuvers and tests before taking the next leap.
When the images of the landing, the parachutes and the recovery in the Pacific pass, what will remain will be something much more profound than a postcard of the return. Artemis II will have shown that it is possible send astronauts back to the lunar environmentbring them back and successfully complete the most demanding part of the flight.
Images | POT
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