The crew of the Artemis II is heading back home to Earth with splashdown in the Pacific scheduled for tonight.

The crew has travelled the farthest away from Earth than any human before after passing on the dark side of the moon.

The past president of the Royal Astronomical Society, Garry Dymond, says the crew wasn’t just on a sight-seeing mission; they achieved a number of important tasks helping to pave the way for further space exploration.

They practiced making a storm tent, where basically they moved water to one side of the spacecraft and put up reflectors so that the radiation wouldn’t hit them. They wanted to make sure that worked for the next people who are put there for…a longer time. They’ve done so many things and now, they’re coming back!”

He says re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere is difficult enough, but in this case, they’re heading back to Earth at speeds faster than any capsule before.

Dymond says they’ve got to come back into the Earth’s atmosphere 120 km above the Earth’s surface, and in order to slow down, they have to “turn the capsule slowly, so that it bounces, and hits the side of the atmosphere, slowing it down. Then they turn the capsule out and do another orbit to slow it down and then they enter the atmosphere.”