The long-awaited voyage will kick off NASA’s Moon to Mars Artemis program.
Washington:
NASA is aiming to make a second attempt to launch its giant next-generation Moon rocket Saturday, Sept. 3, after a pair of technical issues thwarted an initial attempt to get the spacecraft off the ground for the first time, agency officials said. Gave. agency officials said on Tuesday.
But chances of success on Saturday were clouded by weather reports predicting just a 40% chance of favorable conditions that day, while the US space agency acknowledged some outstanding technical issues remain to be resolved. .
At a media briefing a day after Monday’s first countdown ended, NASA officials said Monday’s experience was useful in troubleshooting some problems and that additional difficulties could have been worked out in the middle of a second launch attempt.
As such, the launch exercise was essentially serving as a real-time dress rehearsal that would hopefully end with an actual, successful liftoff.
For now, NASA officials said, the plan is to keep the 32-story-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion astronaut capsule on its launch pad so that the massive spacecraft can be carried more widely in its assembly building. Rolling can be avoided. Test and repair rounds.
If all goes as expected, the SLS will blast off Saturday afternoon from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida during a two-hour launch window that opens at 2:17 p.m., sending Orion on an uncrewed , six- week test flight around the Moon and back.
The long-awaited trip would launch NASA’s Moon to Mars Artemis program, the successor to the Apollo lunar project of the 1960s and ’70s, before the American manned spaceflight effort Space Shuttle and the International Space Station with low-Earth transferred to the class. ,
NASA’s initial Artemis I launch attempt ended Monday, when data showed that one of the rocket’s main-stage engines failed to reach the proper pre-launch temperature required for ignition, preventing a countdown and postponement. fell.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, mission managers said they believed a faulty sensor in the engine section of the rocket was the culprit for the engine cooling issue.
As a measure for Saturday’s effort, mission managers plan to begin the engine-cooling process about 30 minutes before the launch countdown, NASA’s Artemis launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said. But a complete explanation for the faulty sensor requires more data analysis by engineers.
“The way the sensor is behaving is not consistent with the physics of the situation,” said John Honeycutt, NASA’s SLS program manager.
Honeycutt said the sensor was last checked and calibrated at the rocket factory months ago. Replacing the sensors would require returning the rocket to its assembly building, a process that could delay the mission for months.
The maiden voyage of SLS-Orion, a mission called Artemis I, aims to put the 5.75-million-pound vehicle in a rigorous demonstration flight pushing its design limits, before NASA is able to carry astronauts. be reliable enough.
Named for the goddess who was Apollo’s twin sister in ancient Greek mythology, Artemis wants to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon in early 2025, although many experts believe the time frame to be a few years. Will slip
The last humans to walk on the Moon were the two-person descent team of Apollo 17 in 1972, following in the footsteps of 10 other astronauts during five prior missions, starting with Apollo 11 in 1969.
Artemis is also enlisting commercial and international help to eventually establish a long-term lunar base as a stepping stone for even more ambitious human voyages to Mars, a goal NASA officials say will probably be less likely. Less will take to achieve by the end of 2030.
But NASA has a number of steps to take to begin with bringing the SLS-Orion vehicle into space.
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