Artemis II safely splashes down
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/artemis-ii-splashdown-return/
NASA's Artemis II astronauts returned to Earth with a splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean after making a high-speed reentry through the atmosphere.
I had to explain to my wife and kids (not that I'm in this field, but I also have to remind myself) that we are able to pinpoint where the craft will land, when it will land down to the minute, because of ... just ... math. And we're able to get them there and back because of science.
It all boils down to equations that describe the world accurately, and a way of experimentation, iteration, thinking that gets us all the way to do something this unbelievably complex.
The analogies for these things like "hitting a golf ball into a hole in one 5,000 miles away" are always fun.
I like starting from the fact that Ptolemy was able to get the accuracy of the "motions of the heavens" down so well that it took more than a thousand years to get observations that showed discrepancies. The math, it maths.
Agreed.
Fun info: The NASA orbital codes include things like photon pressure... from sunlight reflected off of other planets in the solar system. At some point, I think they are just showing off :)
areoform