The Artemis II crew are due to splashdown overnight as they return from their groundbreaking Moon mission. The four astronauts will come hurtling towards Earth in the Orion spacecraft before landing off the coast of California. NASA teams on the ground are completing final preparations on Friday for Orion's re-entry and splashdown.
Within two hours after splashdown, the crew will be extracted from Orion and flown to the USS John P. Murtha. Recovery teams will retrieve the crew using helicopters, and once aboard the ship, the astronauts will undergo postmission medical evaluations before returning to shore to board an aircraft bound for NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The Orion's re-entry and splashdown are scheduled for around 8.07pm ET (1.07am GMT) on Friday. During re-entry, the service module will separate about 20 minutes before Orion reaches the upper atmosphere southeast of Hawaii.
If needed, a final trajectoryadjustment burn will finetune the flight path before the spacecraft begins a series of roll manoeuvres to safely distance itself from departing hardware.
NASA explained: "As Orion descends through about 400,000 feet, the spacecraft will enter a planned sixminute communications blackout as plasma forms around the capsule during peak heating.
"The crew is expected to experience up to 3.9 Gs in a nominal landing profile."
After emerging from blackout, Orion will jettison its forward bay cover, deploy its drogue parachutes near 22,000 feet, and then unfurl its three main parachutes around 6,000 feet to slow the capsule for splashdown.
Johnson Space Centre director Vanessa Wyche said the Orion crew "are demonstrating that that spacecraft is ready for us to have humans on board for us to continue deep space exploration, which we have not done since 1972".
She said: "It's hard to describe the significance of this mission.... So this is the the Artemis generation. This is our generation's opportunity to explore and to build from what Apollo did. But moving to the moon, we're now going to have a moon base.
"We're going to learn how to live there. We're going to go to Mars. It opens up all of the universe. It's just amazing for human exploration."
The Express will be bringing you live updates of the astronaut's journey back to Earth and splashdown. Click here to follow the coverage.
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Artemis II's historic journey around moon ends with dramatic splashdown
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Artemis II's historic journey around moon ends with dramatic splashdown
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