At the exact time and place, in the Pacific Ocean, NASA’s Orion space capsule returned to Earth, marking the end of the first test flight of the US space agency’s New Moon program.

Orion’s planned arrival to Earth was at 7:40 p.m. Galactic time on Sunday, which happened exactly the minute. Based on the live feed, the spaceship module descended near the coast of Mexico with the help of three brake parachutes.

The US space agency’s new moon program is Artemis, whose first unmanned flight was the Artemis I mission. Its purpose was to test the spacecraft capsule, and to prepare for a manned flight in the future. The rocket, which carries the spacecraft’s Orion module and several science instruments in its nose cone, launched Nov. 16 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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After launch, Orion entered lunar orbit. It approached the celestial body at a distance of about 130 kilometersand in its orbit, on the far side of the moon, it has moved away, approximately 63 thousand km It set a record, as spacecraft designed for human travel have never been so far from Earth.

The total budget for the test flight was $4 billion (about 1,600 billion forints).

NASA’s goal is to get people to land on the Moon again in the second half of the decade.

The day of the return of the Orion spacecraft coincides with the successful landing of Apollo 17 on the moon: on December 11, 1972, the last man stepped on the surface of the moon, in the person of astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt.

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