The flight of NASA's Artemis (purple) uses two very close encounters with the moon's gravity (green) to changes its trajectory to get back to the earth (blue.) Amazing.
@BenHouston3D looks like it is going incredibly fast when it smashes back into the earth!
@jamesjefferies Interesting, you are correct, according to the speed in the bottom left, it will be doing 10km/s when it comes back to earth. Maybe it does another gravity type encounter, this time with earth, that kills its forward speed? Probably information on this somewhere online…
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@BenHouston3D @jamesjefferies The atmosphere will gradually slow it down. Apollo missions had similar reentry speeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry#Real_(equilibrium)_gas_model
