The longest voyage made by a human into space ended on Friday evening.
The four-member crew of the Artemis II mission, which included the first Canadian on a lunar flight, gently splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, off San Diego, California, at the projected time of 8:07 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
The command module, the part of the Orion spacecraft dubbed Integrity, gently landed in the ocean water at the conclusion of a historic ten-day trip.
The mission broke the record for the furthest trip from Earth by a human, set in 1970 by the Apollo XIII astronauts. The round trip was just over 1.1-million kilometres, or 685,000 miles.
The crew consisted of Commander Reid Wiseman of Baltimore, Command Module Pilot Victor Glover of Ponoma, California, Mission Specialist Christina Koch of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen of London.
Hansen, a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) colonel, also made history as the first non-American to travel to deep space and the first Canadian to enter lunar orbit.
Koch is the first woman to embark on a lunar mission, and Glover is the first Black astronaut to do so.
Artemis II launched on April 1, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first manned lunar flight since Apollo XVI in 1972. The trip was a lunar orbit, during which the crew conducted multiple experiments and took photos and videos of the lunar surface, including the "far side".
The USS John P. Murtha travelled from Naval Base San Diego to the splashdown zone Friday evening to collect the spacecraft and pick up the crew.
