NASA's Orion capsule heads for home on final leg of Artemis 1 moon mission
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...Passing within a scant 81 miles of the moon, NASA's unpiloted Orion capsule fired its main engine Monday in a gravity-assist lunar flyby that put the ship on course for a return to Earth Sunday to close out the Artemis 1 test flight.

The 3-minute 27-second burn, starting at 11:43:23 a.m. EST, took place on the far side of the moon while the spacecraft was out of contact with flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But the orbital maneuvering system engine worked flawlessly, firing on time with 6,000 pounds of thrust to change the capsule's velocity by 655 mph. The burn set up a precisely-targeted re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of San Diego at 12:40 p.m. EST Sunday.

Plunging back into the discernible atmosphere at some 25,000 mph, the Orion's heat shield will have to withstand temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees as it dives in, skips back out slightly and then re-enters for good, slowing to just 117 mph by the time its main parachutes deploy two-and-a-half minutes before splashdown.

With a joint NASA-Navy recovery team standing by, the Orion will hit the water at a relatively sedate 20 mph to close out a 25-day voyage spanning 1.4 million miles since launch November 16 from the Kennedy Space Center atop NASA's first Space Launch System super heavy-lift rocket....