Watch live: Orion set for return to Earth today to complete Artemis I mission

NASA chased down the Orion spacecraft after its record-breaking re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere today to conclude the Artemis I mission the lifted off from Kennedy Space Center 25 1/2 days ago.

Recovery teams led by KSC’s Exploration Ground Systems welcomed home the uncrewed Orion capsule as it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean near Guadalupe Island off the coast of Baja California south of San Diego at 12:40 p.m. EST Sunday.

NASA provided live coverage of the return on NASA TV.

“The target for Orion is growing larger in the field of view moment by moment,” said Rob Navias with NASA communications about 90 minutes ahead of arrival. “It is homecoming day.”

The return velocity saw Orion hit the atmosphere at a reported 24,464 mph, which is faster than any previous human-rated spacecraft.

The primary goal of the uncrewed Artemis I mission is to ensure Orion’s heat shied can withstand the nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit temperature generated by re-entry and open the door for NASA to proceed with Artemis II, which aims to send four astronauts on an orbital moon mission no earlier than May 2024. That would then be followed by Artemis III no earlier than 2025, which would return humans, including the first woman, to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Orion performed its sixth and final return trajectory correction burn Sunday morning to ensure it’s headed to the correct landing site. At noon Orion at about 3,200 miles altitude separated from its service module that has been providing propulsion during its trip around the moon and back.

At 12:20, Orion then began to carve its way through the atmosphere at about 400,000 feet altitude and 3,659 miles from the target landing site making it away across the South Pacific Ocean.

“Orion will dip into the Earth’s atmosphere and begin what basically is a hellish entry where temperatures around the spacecraft will raise to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit,” Navias said. “That’s half as hot as the outer surface of the sun.”

The dip maneuver is similar to skipping a rock on a pond, Navias said, that slowed the spacecraft down further ahead a planned parachute-assisted landing and recovery by a fleet of vessels that have been readying for Orion’s arrival since last week.

“Flight dynamics reports Orion straight and narrow on a true course to its splashdown site,” Navias said with video images on NASA’s live stream with nearly 250,000 people watching that showed the cloudy skies of Earth from the capsule’s point of view.

Weather is mostly clear and seas are around 4-5 feet.

“It’s just another day in the park for us,” said Navy Diver 1st Class Wayne Shearer. “We’ve trained for the last year and a half for us. We’ve been in worse seas than this recovering anything under the water. It’s just different, instead of recovering something from under the water, we’ll be recovering something that fell from the sky.”

Teams will prep the capsule to be loaded onto the deck of the U.S.S. Portland for a trip back to San Diego.

Both Orion and the Space Launch System rocket that brought it into space have been ticking off NASA’s checkboxes for mission objectives on its 1.4 million mile trip.

Orion became the record holder for human-rated spacecraft flying to more than 268,000 miles away from Earth during a distant retrograde orbit of the moon, and SLS became the most powerful rocket to ever make it into space when it blasted off from KSC on Nov. 16, generating 8.8 million pounds of thrust in an overnight launch that lit up the Space Coast.

The first SLS flight was originally targeted for 2016 after the program was announced in 2012, but cost overruns and delays from COVID-19, hurricanes and manufacturing complexities kept pushing the target launch window to 2022. NASA then had to plow through a bevy of launch pad fueling snafus during testing and launch attempts as well as the interpolation of both hurricanes Ian and Nicole before finally making off the ground.

Once in the air, though, the mission plan proceeded without any serious issues so that NASA now has a flight-proven rocket to support its deep-space plans including send the first human to Mars by 2040.

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