Overview
- NASA’s initial inspection found Orion’s Artemis II heat shield performed as designed and showed much less char loss than on Artemis I.
- A new diver photo released by NASA shows the post‑splashdown shield, and a discolored patch flagged online matches an expected compression‑pad area rather than missing material.
- Engineers kept the shield design and instead tweaked the skip‑entry path, which briefly dips in and out of the atmosphere to cut peak heating, and early results indicate that change worked.
- The crew module will go to Kennedy Space Center for more checks before moving to Marshall Space Flight Center for sample removal and internal X‑ray scans.
- Teams will also review airborne reentry images and fix an unrelated toilet issue caused by frozen urine to get ready for Artemis 3.