The space agency paid homage to the Apollo missions, and Frank Sinatra’s «Fly Me to the Moon.»
Following its trip to the Moon and back, NASA’s Orion spacecraft splashed down into the Pacific Ocean on Sunday. The inaugural flight for the Artemis program may have been uncrewed, but Orion carried five souvenirs to honor a legacy of lunar exploration.
NASA has a longstanding tradition of stashing hidden messages and mementos on board its spacecraft. In 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched to interstellar space carrying a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk known as The Golden Record. The phonograph record included various images and sounds that represent life on Earth in case it is ever found by spacefaring aliens. More recently, NASA engineers encoded a binary message on the Perseverance rover’s parachute that read, “Dare Mighty Things.”
For the Artemis 1 mission to the Moon, NASA stuck to a lunar theme.
