A Nasa official has said he’ll ’be anxious’ as Artemis II returns to earth after midnight tonight.
The crew of Nasa’s first manned mission to the Moon in more than 50 years started their four-day journey home on Tuesday.
Nasa associate administrator Amit Kshatriya said "there’s no question that I’ll be anxious," but added he had "full confidence" in the team.
"We’ll be with the families. We’ll be with them. We’ll all be together."
He said it was "impossible" not to have irrational fears.
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"But I would tell you I don’t have any rational fears about what’s going to happen."
After spending ten days in outer space, a capsule containing the four astronauts will glide beneath parachutes, splashing down near San Diego in California just after midnight tonight UK time.
Collectively, they have travelled further than any human before them, reaching 252,756 miles from earth, breaking Apollo 13’s previous record achieved in 1970 of 248,655 miles.
The crew will reach speeds of up to 25,000 miles per hour as the capsule re-enters Earth’s atmosphere.
The speed of the return to earth will cause gas and air particles to compress and generate intense heat around the capsule, severing communication between the astronauts and Mission Control at around 12:53am.
The team will be protected from heat up to 2,760C by a three-inch shield.
Two parachutes will bring the speed of Orion down to about 300 miles at 1:03am, before further parachutes slow it to 17 miles per hour.
In total it will take 13 minutes between the crew entering the atmosphere and landing off the coast of San Diego.
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Asked if the mission’s objectives had been achieved, Branelle Rodriguez, Artemis II Orion vehicle manager, said in a press conference: "As far as the things that we’ve learned, write it as a test flight..
"We are learning things on the spacecraft."
She added: "We gather those data, as Jeff noted, we take characterisation tests of systems that we won’t get back home.
"And when we get back home and the vehicle comes back, we’ll do a lot of post-processing of all that data."
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