A capsule with four astronauts splashed down off the coast of San Diego (California, USA).
A NASA and US military rescue team picked up Gregory Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christine Koch, and Jeremy Hansen and took them to the USS Murtha, the space agency said.
There they will undergo a medical examination, and then return to shore and fly to NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas.
US President Donald Trump welcomed the return of Artemis II to Earth and invited astronauts to the White House.
“We'll do this again, and then the next step is Mars!” he wrote in Truth Social.
During the mission, the astronauts flew a total of 694,481 miles (1,117,653 km), farther than humans had ever traveled before, surpassing the previous distance record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970.
The crew performed a series of tests that will help determine how NASA will conduct future missions to the Moon, including evaluating vehicle performance during crew exercise, emergency equipment and procedures, and crew survival systems, NASA said in a release.
Context
The Artemis II mission launched on April 2 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the Orion spacecraft, which left Earth orbit and successfully entered a flight path to the Moon. The GORDON publication told details about the historical mission.
On April 7, NASA published photographs of the Moon taken by astronauts of the Artemis II mission during their approach to the Moon. As they flew over the far side of the Moon, the crew photographed and described terrain features including impact craters, ancient lava flows, and cracks and ridges on the surface.
