NASA’s Artemis I Mission Successfully

Returns from the Moon

Fifty years ago today humans landed on the lunar surface for the last
time during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission. And now, after a journey of 1.4
million miles, NASA’s Orion spacecraft is safely back on Earth—marking
the completion of the agency’s Artemis I mission and the first step toward
returning humans to the moon.

“Artemis is paving the way to live and work in deep space, in a hostile
environment—to invent, to create and ultimately to go on with humans to
Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters nearly two weeks
before the splashdown.

Launched in the wee hours of November 16, Artemis I is the first flight
test of NASA’s massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the first
lunar foray of the agency’s crew-rated Orion spacecraft. During its 26-
day mission, Orion traced a record-setting path around the moon,
looping to within 80 miles of the lunar surface—and, at its farthest, flying
beyond the moon to a point about 270,000 miles from Earth. NASA
managers put the spacecraft through its paces and challenged it to stay
functional in the hostile environment of deep space for much longer
than a typical crewed mission would last. They tested its propulsion,
communication, life support and navigation systems—and found no
major issues.

The most crucial —and dangerous—test happened today, when

Orion left space and made its high-speed return to Earth. Traveling about
25,000 miles an hour, the spacecraft performed what’s called a
skip reentry , briefly dipping in and out of the atmosphere’s outskirts
to bleed off speed before making a second, final plunge. The next time it
touched Earth’s air, instead of skimming across the atmosphere like
a skipping stone, Orion dove all the way through. As the spacecraft
plummeted, atmospheric friction heated its exterior to more than
5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or roughly half as hot as the surface
of the sun.
 “They’re basically going through a blowtorch ,” says Daniel
Dumbacher, who oversaw the SLS’s initial development while he was at
NASA and now serves as executive director of the American
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “We will never, ever be
comfortable and complacent about reentry. Reentry is a high-risk, high-
energy [maneuver]; you want to make sure you get it right.”

Surviving that plunge without burning up required the spacecraft’s heat

shield to work perfectly—and it did. Next up were the drogue and
main onboard parachutes , that latter of which deployed when the
capsule was 5,300 feet above the Pacific Ocean, slowing its speed to a
mere 20 miles an hour.

By 12:40 P.M. ET Orion was safely bobbing like an oversize, multibillion-

dollar cork amid the whitecaps off the coast of Guadalupe Island,
awaiting recovery by a contingent of NASA and U.S. Navy personnel.

Missing Words:
coast - record-setting – exterior – parachutes - Space Launch System (SLS)
lunar surface – hostile – drogue - deep space – blowtorch - skip reentry
crucial – paving – atmosphere - executive director - surface