US astronaut Gregory Reid Wiseman, who led the Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight to orbit the moon in more than five decades, released extraordinary footage today (Tuesday) showing the moments of rescue of him and his crew members.
The footage, filmed from the helmet camera of one of the rescuers, begins immediately after the landing in the Pacific Ocean over the weekend.
The Orion capsule, nicknamed “Integrity," entered the atmosphere at a speed 32 times the speed of sound and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California.
In the video, a joint recovery team from NASA and the US military can be seen opening the escape hatch and meeting the astronauts who had just returned from space.
“After the landing in the Pacific Ocean, the astronauts met with a joint NASA and US military team that assisted them in exiting the spacecraft in open water," NASA said in an official statement.
Immediately after being extracted from the capsule, the astronauts were lifted by helicopter and flown aboard the aircraft carrier USS John P. Murtha.
There, under close supervision, they underwent a series of initial medical checks to assess the effects of their time in space and their lunar flight on their bodies.
Last Monday, the spacecraft crew broke a new human record, reaching the farthest distance from Earth ever achieved by humans-approximately 406,800 kilometers. This surpassed the previous record set during Apollo 13 in 1970.