NASA photos show incredible moment Orion splashed back down to Earth

NASA has shared new photos of the incredible moment the Orion space capsule returned to Earth after flying around the moon. The unmanned Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, west of Baja California, at 09:40 PST (17:40 GMT) on Sunday. Since its launch in mid-November, it has travelled more than 1.4 million miles on a path around the moon and back to Earth. The images show before and after the historic point of impact, which marks the first part of Artemis – NASA's successor to the Apollo programme in the 1960s and 1970s. NASA's Orion Capsule descends toward splash down after a successful uncrewed Artemis 1 Moon Mission on December 11, 2022 seen from aboard the USS Portland in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California, Mexico Artemis 1 is NASA's uncrewed flight test of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, which launched on November 16 from Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida.