NASA's Orion capsule splashed down back to Earth on Sunday, December 11, at 9:40 AM PST (11:10 PM IST). The Orion's landing in the Pacific Ocean marked the end of the inaugural Artemis 1 lunar mission exactly 50 years after Apollo's final moon landing. As per NASA's press release, the “gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, carrying a simulated crew of three mannequins wired with sensors”, landed in the Pacific Ocean, off Mexico's Baja California peninsula. It also performed a new landing technique called 'skip entry', designed to help the spacecraft accurately splash down at the landing site. Orion entered the Earth’s upper atmosphere and used the atmosphere and its lift to “skip” back outside the atmosphere only to re-enter once again. Why is the Artemis 1 mission important, and how is it different from NASA's earlier lunar missions? What are the risks the capsule faced as it splashed down? We explain. 'Throwing a football and hitting a penny' In its 35-day mission, the Orion passed about 127 km above the moon in a fly-by. Orion entered Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of over 40,000 kilometres per hour – more than 30 times the speed of sound – for a “fiery, 20-minute plunge to the ocean”, as described by Reuters. Artemis 1 was essentially an experimental mission, to check if the capsule can be trusted to ferry humans to the moon and back in future missions. Thus, safe re-entry was critical to the success of the whole initiative. As it hurtled towards Earth, Orion experienced such friction and pressure that its forward-facing surface could have generated temperatures likely to reach around 3,000C, as reported by the BBC. “It's essentially like throwing a football 300 yards and hitting a penny," Eric Coffman, Orion propulsion senior manager at Lockheed Martin Corp, which built Orion under contract with NASA, told Reuters. After its success, a crewed Artemis II will go around the moon and back by 2024, followed in a few years by Artemis III, which will see astronauts, including a woman, land on the moon. Aims of Artemis 1 Artemis 1 is being seen by NASA as a stepping stone to much greater things. It is the first in a series of missions that are planned to not only take humans back to the Moon, but to also explore the possibilities of extended stay there, and to investigate the potential to use the Moon as a launch pad for deep space explorations. “With Orion safely returned to Earth we can begin to see our next mission on the horizon which will fly crew to the Moon for the first time as a part of the next era of exploration,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, adding, “This begins our path to a regular cadence of missions and a sustained human presence at the Moon for scientific discovery and to prepare for human missions to Mars.” The Artemis missions will build on the existing achievements of space technologies over the past few decades and lay the foundations for more complex and ambitious missions in the future. It will work towards extracting the resources found on the Moon, building from the materials available there, and harnessing hydrogen or helium as energy sources. How is Artemis 1 different from NASA's earlier lunar missions? As reported earlier by The Indian Express, although their objective is to ensure the return of humans to the Moon, the Artemis missions — named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister — are going to be qualitatively very different from the Apollo missions of 50 years ago. The Moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s were guided by Cold War geo-political considerations, and the desire of the United States to go one up on the Soviet Union — which had scored by launching the first satellite, Sputnik, and the first spacecraft, Luna 2, to crash on to the lunar surface, and sending the first man to space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. So President John F Kennedy made a public announcement in 1961 that the US would put a man on the Moon before the decade was out. That deadline was met, thanks to a massive mobilisation of resources towards that end. But the technology ecosystem wasn’t fully ready yet to fully realise the potential of that monumental scientific breakthrough — and the astronauts who landed on the Moon could do little more than bring back samples to Earth for investigations.
