Astronauts on Artemis II, the first manned Moon mission in more than 50 years, have splashed down off the coast of California after a record-breaking 10-day voyage.
Helping oversee the epic trip has been a team at Goonhilly Earth Station, on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, which has been tracking the first Moon mission in more than 50 years.
You can read more about their role here: Cornwall’s Goonhilly joins NASA’s first crewed lunar mission in 50 years
At 1.07am today (Saturday) UK time – 8.07pm local time – the crew carried out a planned landing in the ocean off the coast of San Diego, after the the capsule’s parachutes deployed once through the atmosphere.
NASA said the four crew members – Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Jeremy Hansen – were healthy.
Mission Control’s Rob Navias described their return as “a perfect bullseye splashdown”.
During re-entry, their Orion capsule was expected to hit the atmosphere at around 24,000mph (38,625kph), or about 32 times the speed of sound.
In a critical test for the spacecraft’s heat shield, temperatures outside were set to soar to as high as 2,760C (5,000F).
Following a previous test flight, engineers had altered the descent trajectory in order to reduce the risk of the module burning up.
The intensity of the return meant contact with the crew was cut off for several minutes, prior to the deployment of parachutes eventually slowing the capsule’s fall to just 17mph (27kph) before hitting the water.
Cheers erupted from the crew’s families watching in Mission Control in Houston when the capsule emerged from the communication blackout and at splashdown.
The moment of splashdown in the sea off San Diego (Image: Bill Ingalls/NASA/AP)
More than an hour after landing in the Pacific Ocean, the four crew members emerged from the capsule ahead of being taken to the nearby naval ship USS John P Murtha by helicopter.
Refusing the wheelchairs offered to them, the astronauts walked across the deck and after undergoing initial medical checks on board, they were expected to return to Johnson Space Centre in Houston on Saturday.
This week NASA officials were ensuring “they don’t take their eye off the ball” as astronauts neared their return to Earth after travelling deeper into space than anyone before.
The Artemis II crew successfully completed a test flight around the Moon.
A news conference heard scientists were continuing to learn from the epic voyage that would inform future missions.
This included monitoring the impact of the deep space environment on the three Americans and Canadian aboard the Orion module.
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Lakiesha Hawkins, NASA’s acting deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development, said earlier this week: “The mission continues to go well as the crew prepares to transition back to Earth and we get ready for entry day.
“The team is turning our attention to the return and getting the crew safely home.
“Now, because this is a development flight, we are thinking about what we can still learn in the remaining days to better understand the systems and to inform future missions.”
NASA Artemis Moonshot
An image taken from the Orion capsule showing the Earth behind the Moon (Nasa via AP)
She added: “The experiments about human health are going to give us data that we need to be able to live on the moon longer, as we develop the moon base, and be able to prepare for farther trips, like going on to Mars.
“During Apollo, they didn’t gather this kind of human health data and we can’t get this information during low Earth orbit missions.”
Ms Hawkins went on: “When a mission goes well, it can look like flying to the Moon is easy. It certainly is not.
“We can’t forget that this is a test flight, and are taking everything that we’re learning forward to support the next mission.
“This has been a good mission so far, and we’re nearing the end, having retired a significant number of risks over recent days, but the team remains focused, and we’re making sure that we don’t take our eye off the ball.
“Countless hours of people working together behind the scenes have been preparing for these moments, and people are still giving their all to ensure mission success.
“We continue to improve, to make our ultimate goals of going to the lunar surface, building the moon base and eventually sending the first humans to Mars, a reality.”
The time between re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere and landing in the Pacific Ocean was around 13 minutes.
Mission flight director Rick Henfling explained beforehand: “So it’s going to happen pretty quick.”
He added: “It’s very dynamic. So similarly to the launch environment, there’s not a lot of time to react.”
The last time NASA sent astronauts to the Moon was as part of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
The agency is seeking to return a crew to the lunar surface by 2028, before China does in about 2030.