Orion capsule landed in the Pacific after a trip to the Moon

Published at: 10/04/2026 10:23 PM

About 40 minutes after decoupling from the Orion service module, the capsule with the four astronauts of the Artemis II mission landed on the night of this Friday, April 10, in the Pacific Ocean, around 8 p.m. (Eastern time) about 3,704 kilometers off the coast of San Diego, California, according to the Telesur website.

In the final stretch of a historic lunar trip, the first since the program's last mission in 1972, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen experienced the re-entry of the capsule in autopilot mode into the Earth's atmosphere, where the vehicle reached temperatures of up to 2,700 degrees Celsius outside and a speed of more than 40,200 kilometers per hour on the descent.

The impact on the atmosphere occurred at Mach 33 (33 times the speed of sound). The tension in Mission Control increased when the capsule became engulfed in red-hot plasma during the peak of heating and went into a planned communications blackout, lasting about six minutes, common when the returning modules enter the gaseous layer that surrounds the Earth.

The approximately 14 minutes of re-entry are a critical mission maneuver, after the more than eight minutes of risk of takeoff, on April 1 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Orion deployed 11 parachutes in its fall, which gradually slowed down to less than 32 kilometers per hour before the fall into the ocean.

“Seconds after entry, we will begin a six-minute communication interruption period, due to ionization that will generate a layer of plasma around the spacecraft, which will prevent us from receiving communications and data,” NASA explained.

It was not the first time without communications, because it also occurred for about 40 minutes last Monday, while Orion was flying over the dark side of the Moon, making it impossible to connect to the control center.

After entering the Earth's atmosphere, friction with air, high at that speed of entry, slowed down the ship, which deployed braking parachutes at a height of about 6,200 meters until it fell into Pacific waters, where ships of the American Armed Forces were waiting for them, whose recovery maneuver takes about 40 minutes.

A specialized Navy group will carry out the medical evaluations. NASA announced that after returning, crew members must undergo medical examinations and spend time with their family, so it will take weeks to make statements to the press.

Artemis II returns to Earth after having traveled more than 740,000 kilometers in its 10-day mission.

After its launch on April 1, Artemis II didn't land on the Moon or even orbit, but it broke Apollo 13's distance record and marked the longest distance humans have traveled from Earth, when the crew reached 406,771 kilometers.

During the record flyby of the far side of the Moon, on Monday, April 6, they documented scenes never before seen by the human eye, along with a total solar eclipse.

Once the astronauts were recovered by the divers, taken to an inflatable platform and then taken by helicopter to a Navy ship, on the way to the revisions on the ground, the Orion would be towed by a ship to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after having traveled almost a million kilometers.