Artemis II Heads Home for Friday Night Pacific Splashdown After Record Lunar Flyby

Overview

• NASA says Orion is on course to splash down off Southern California on Friday night, April 10.
• Speaking with reporters two days before landing, the four astronauts said the Moon flyby left them awed and still processing the experience.
• The capsule’s toilet, the Universal Waste Management System, had intermittent failures that forced the crew to use backup urine bags while engineers worked remote fixes.
• Flight controllers reported a burnt-heater smell in the cabin and pointed to frozen urine in a vent line and trouble emptying the waste tank as likely causes.
• To reduce risk and conserve bandwidth on the Deep Space Network, NASA flew pre-certified Microsoft Surface Pro tablets running older Windows software, and independent observers in Brazil used NASA trajectory data to image Orion between April 2 and 6.