Artemis II astronauts return home, ending record-breaking NASA mission around the moon

The four Artemis II astronauts are back safely on Earth after flying around the moon on NASA’s first lunar mission in more than 50 years.

After a fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere that lasted nearly 15 minutes, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego in their Orion capsule at 8:07 p.m. ET.

“Y’all, we did it,” Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said Friday in a post-landing news briefing. “We sent four amazing people to the moon and safely returned them to Earth for the first time in more than 50 years.”

It was a picture-perfect splashdown, with the capsule landing upright under three huge parachutes as recovery teams raced to the scene.

Minutes before, a six-minute communications blackout with mission controllers made for a nail-biting finish to the mission as the capsule plunged through Earth’s atmosphere.

Then, a very welcome call-out came over the airwaves.

“Houston, Integrity, we have you loud and clear,” Wiseman radioed to Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, using the name “Integrity” that the crew gave to their spacecraft.

After NASA and U.S. Navy recovery teams checked the area for debris and other hazardous materials, the Artemis II crew members were helped out of the capsule one by one. Wiseman, the mission’s commander, was last to exit.

The four astronauts were then flown by helicopter to the USS John P. Murtha, a U.S. Navy transport dock ship. Once on board, they underwent post-mission medical evaluations. Later on Friday, the astronauts are expected to return to shore and fly to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the agency said.

The astronauts’ return marks the end of the 10-day mission, during which they flew around the moon and became the first humans to see the entire lunar far side with their own eyes. The crew was also the first to launch aboard NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule.

As they swung around the moon, the astronauts set a new record for the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth: 252,756 miles. They surpassed the previous record of 248,655 miles set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 during their emergency return to Earth.

During their lunar flyby, the Artemis II crew members captured breathtaking photos of the moon’s far side, including never-before-seen features on the lunar surface: rugged topography, countless craters, ridges, mountains and ancient lava plains. The moon’s far side permanently faces away from Earth, and even most of the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s did not yield views of the far side because of the paths and timing of the flights.

The Artemis II astronauts recorded observations of impact basins that formed billions of years ago, when large objects smacked into the lunar surface, and studied jagged features along the moon’s terminator, the dividing line between its illuminated side and the side cloaked in darkness.

NASA said these images will help scientists understand how the moon formed and how its landscape has changed over time.

Over the entirety of the mission, the Artemis II astronauts flew a total of 700,237 miles, according to NASA flight director Rick Henfling. He added that their return to Earth was almost right on target, with the Orion capsule landing within less than a mile of the targeted splashdown site and following a near-perfect flight path.

“What a tremendous day,” Henfling said.

The successful end of the Artemis II mission is a major relief for NASA, given prior concerns about Orion capsule’s heat shield, the layer of thermal protection at the bottom of the spacecraft that protects astronauts from extreme temperatures during atmospheric re-entry.

Re-entering Earth’s atmosphere is always a dangerous and risky part of human spaceflight, because a capsule plunging through the atmosphere can be exposed to temperatures of around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But the stakes were especially high for the Artemis II mission because the Orion heat shield had a known flaw in its design.

During the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022, NASA found that part of the heat shield’s material cracked during re-entry, “causing some charred material to break off in several locations.” To minimize risk to the Artemis II astronauts, NASA modified the capsule’s entry path so that it descended faster and at a steeper angle to shorten the amount of time it was exposed to the most extreme temperatures.

NASA said a full analysis will be done to assess the performance of the heat shield in the coming days after the Orion capsule arrives at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, said the Artemis II mission was a critical stepping stone for NASA’s goal to land on the moon on a future Artemis flight.

NASA aims to launch the next mission, Artemis III, in mid-2027 to conduct technology demonstrations in low-Earth orbit with one or both of the lunar landers being built by SpaceX or Blue Origin. In 2028, the agency plans to launch the Artemis IV mission to land on the moon.

“The path to the lunar surface is open, but the work ahead is greater than the work behind us,” Kshatriya said. “It always will be. Fifty-three years ago, humanity left the moon. This time, we return to stay.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com