"And it is a brand new heat shield design, and it is a safety-critical piece of equipment. "There is no arc jet or aerothermal facility here on Earth capable of replicating hypersonic reentry with a heat shield of this size," he said. Testing the heat shield was, in fact, the top priority of the Artemis 1 mission, "and it is our priority-one objective for a reason," mission manager Mike Sarafin said Friday. Re-entry and splashdown were the final major objectives of the Artemis 1 test flight, giving engineers confidence the spacecraft's 16.5-foot-wide Apollo-derived Avcoat heat shield and parachutes will work as designed when four astronauts return from the moon after the next Artemis flight in 2024. Once inside, the deck will be sealed, the water pumped out and the spacecraft will be left on a protective cradle for the trip back to Naval Base San Diego.Ī joint Navy-NASA recovery team was standing by within sight of the Orion splashdown to inspect the scorched capsule and, after a final round of tests, tow it into the flooded well deck of the USS Portland, an amphibious dock ship.Īfter the sea water is pumped out, Orion will settle onto a protective cradle for the voyage back to Naval Base San Diego and, eventually, a trip home to the Kennedy Space Center. And the Artemis generation is taking us there." The Orion capsule is towed toward the flooded well deck of the USS Portland, an amphibious transport dock ship. In an appropriate if unplanned coincidence, the splashdown came 50 years to the day after the final Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972 and just 10 hours after SpaceX launched a Japanese moon lander, the first sent up in a purely a commercial venture, from Cape Canaveral. The mission is expected to help pave the way toward the first piloted Artemis moon mission in 2024. 11, 2022 in the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California to close out 25-day test flight around the moon and back. "It's historic, because we are now going back into deep space with a new generation." NASA's unpiloted Orion capsule descends to splashdown Sunday, Dec. This is an extraordinary day," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. EST, 20 minutes after encountering the first traces of the discernible atmosphere 76 miles up. NASA's Artemis 1 moonship returned to Earth Sunday, slamming into the upper atmosphere at more than 24,000 mph and enduring a 5,000-degree re-entry inferno before settling to a picture perfect splashdown in the Pacific Ocean to close out a 25-day 1.4-million-mile test flight to the moon and back.ĭescending under three huge parachutes, the unpiloted 9-ton Orion capsule gently hit the water 200 miles west of Baja California at 12:40 p.m.
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