Orion was nearing the end of its 25-day mission less than a week after passing about 127 km above the moon in a lunar fly-by and about two weeks after reaching its farthest point in space, nearly 434,500 km from Earth.
NASA’s uncrewed Orion capsule hurtled through space on Sunday, December 11, on the final return leg of its voyage around the moon and back, winding up the inaugural mission of the Artemis lunar program 50 years to the day after Apollo’s final moon landing.
After jettisoning the service module housing its main rocket system, the capsule was expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 miles per hour – more than 30 times the speed of sound – for a fiery, 20-minute plunge to the ocean. By coincidence, the return to Earth of Artemis I unfolded on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 moon landing of Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on December 11, 1972. They were the last of 12 NASA astronauts to walk on the moon during a total of six Apollo missions starting in 1969.
“It’s essentially like throwing a football 300 yards and hitting a penny,” Eric Coffman, Orion propulsion senior manager at Lockheed Martin Corp, which built Orion under contract with NASA, told Reuters. NASA officials have stressed the experimental nature of the Artemis I mission, marking the first launch of the Boeing Co -built SLS and the first combined with Orion, which previously flew a brief two-orbit test launched on a smaller Delta IV rocket in 2014.
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