Orion capsule heads back to Earth after moon flight
Nasa's uncrewed Orion capsule hurtled through space on Sunday on the final return leg of its voyage around the moon and back, winding up the inaugural mission of the Artemis lunar program 50 years to the day after Apollo's final moon landing. The gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, carrying a simulated crew of three mannequins wired with sensors, was due to parachute into the Pacific at 9:39am Pacific Time near Guadalupe Island, off Mexico's Baja California peninsula. Orion was nearing the end of its 25-day mission less than a week after passing about 127 kilometres above the moon in a lunar fly-by and about two weeks after reaching its farthest point in space, nearly 434,500 kilometres from Earth. After jettisoning the service module housing its main rocket system, the capsule was expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere at 39,400 kilometres per hour, which is more than 30 times the speed of sound, for a fiery, 20-minute plunge to the ocean. Orion blasted off on November 16 from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop Nasa's towering next-generation Space Launch System (SLS), now the world's most powerful rocket and the biggest Nasa has built since the Saturn V of the Apollo era. The debut SLS-Orion voyage kicked off Apollo's successor program, Artemis, aimed at returning astronauts to the lunar surface this decade and establishing a sustainable base there as a stepping stone to future human exploration of Mars. By coincidence, the return to Earth of Artemis I unfolded on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 moon landing of Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on December 11, 1972. They were the last of 12 Nasa astronauts to walk on the moon during a total of six Apollo missions starting in 1969. (Reuters)