NASA Orion spacecraft enters lunar orbit

NASA's Orion spacecraft successfully completed the long-delayed Moon mission on Friday and placed into lunar orbit, according to officials. 

A little over a week after the spacecraft blasted off from Florida bound for the Moon, flight controllers "successfully performed a burn to insert Orion into a distant retrograde orbit," the US space agency said on its web site, reports AFP.

In the upcoming years, the spacecraft will take astronauts to the Moon, the first to set foot on its surface since the last Apollo mission in 1972.

"The orbit is distant in that Orion will fly about 40,000 miles above the Moon," NASA said. It will take Orion about a week to complete half an orbit around the Moon. It will then exit the orbit for the return journey home, according to NASA.