- After a 10-day mission, Artemis II and its four astronauts – NASA’s Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen – successfully returned to Earth Friday night.
- The splashdown took place off the coast of San Diego, California, landing in the Pacific Ocean.
- A “perfect, bulls-eye splashdown” was confirmed at 5:07 p.m. PT by NASA. All four astronauts were said to be in “excellent shape” following the landing.
- Leading up to the landing, the crew was 400,000 feet above Earth’s surface, heading into splashdown while traveling nearly 35 times the speed of sound.
- The four-person crew went on a 695,081-mile journey around the moon. The crew exited the lunar sphere of influence, the point at which the Moon’s gravity has a stronger pull on Orion than the Earth’s, on April 7, before heading back to Earth.
IN FULL