Earth | Pakistan

The Artemis II capsule and its four-member crew streaked through Earth’s atmosphere and safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday after nearly 10 days in space, capping the first voyage by humans to the vicinity of the moon in over half a century. Nasa’s gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, dubbed Integrity, parachuted gently into calm seas off the Southern California coast shortly after 5:07pm Pacific Time (12:07am GMT on Saturday), concluding a mission that four days prior took the astronauts 252,756 miles away from Earth, deeper into space than anyone had flown before. The Artemis II flight, travelling a total of 694,392 miles (1,117,515km) in two Earth orbits and a climactic lunar flyby some 4,000 miles from its surface, was the debut crewed test flight in a series of Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface starting in 2028. ‘Perfect bull’s splashdown The splashdown under partly cloudy skies was carried by live video feed in a Nasa webcast. “A perfect bull’s eye splashdown f...

The four astronauts of Nasa’s Artemis II mission entered the moon’s gravitational sphere of influence early Monday morning as they cruised along a path that will soon take them over the shadowed, lunar far side to become the farthest-flying humans in history. The Artemis II crew, flying in their Orion capsule since launching from Florida last week, are due to awake around 10:50am ET (7:50pm PKT) on Monday for their sixth flight day. By 7:05pm ET (4:05am PKT), they will reach the mission’s maximum distance from Earth of roughly 252,757 miles, 4,102 miles beyond the record held by the Apollo 13 crew for 56 years. As Nasa astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen approach the distance record, they will be sailing around the moon’s far side, witnessing it from roughly 4,000 miles above its darkened surface as it eclipses a basketball-sized Earth in the distant background. The milestone is a climactic point in the nearly 10-day Artemis II mission, the first crew...

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