How to Watch Artemis II Head Back to Earth From Its Moon Mission

NASA’s Artemis II Orion spacecraft is getting ready to make its grand return to Earth following its mission around the Moon, and you can watch it soar through space as it nears home via a Virtual Telescope Project (VTP) livestream later tonight.

Hosted by astrophysicist Gianluca Masi, the broadcast on Space.com and VTP’s official WebTV will begin at 7:45pm PT / 10:45pm ET on April 9 and 2:45am GMT on April 10, and will use a network of robotic telescopes in Italy to track Artemis II as it flies back to Earth. Assuming the weather cooperates, it will “appear as a faint, fast-moving point of light against the background stars.”

Speaking of coming home, Artemis II is set to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of San Diego, on the evening of Friday, April 10, where it will make a fiery entrance back into our atmosphere.

NASA’s Artemis II successfully lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1 and embarked on its 10-day journey to take humans to the moon for the first time in over 50 years.

On their journey, in addition to making some nods to Project Hail Mary, the crew also went further than any human has gone before. When they went around the moon, they ended up surpassing the record of 248,655 miles held by Apollo 13 from 1970.

This mission is a giant step toward a long-term return to the moon and future missions to Mars, and we wish the whole crew a safe and smooth landing back on Earth.

For more, check out how you can watch NASA’s official livestream of Artemis II’s mission and 11 movies and one mini-series about missions to the moon.

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.