The team in charge of the mission of the POT Artemis I, which aims to pave the way for lunar exploration, gave the green light to the launch attempt scheduled for this Wednesday. from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral (Florida) after reviewing the latest data.
The two-hour window for the fifth shot attempt of the mission opens to 6.04 hours of the Peninsula on Wednesdayas confirmed by NASA engineers at a press conference this Monday night.
“We check the configuration of our vehicle from the top of the spacecraft to the bottom of the rocket, including the flight termination system and batteries that we already reset,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said in a teleconference call.
Likewise, as indicated by those responsible for the mission, A series of problems derived from the passage of Hurricane Nicole were definitively resolved by Cape Canaveral last week, which forced the delay of the previous launch attempt, scheduled for this Monday.
The sealing kit of the launch abort system was loosened by Nicole’s winds hitting the space center platform where the huge and expensive SLS rocket with the Orion capsule at the tip sits.
According to the mission’s blog, engineers took a close look at “the caulk in a seam between a warhead on (the spacecraft) Orion’s launch abort system and the crew module adapter” and the potential risks if it were to become dislodged during the mission. launch.
Engineers determined that “There is a low probability that, if additional material is released, it will present a critical risk to the flight”indicated the US space agency.
The objective of this unmanned mission is to test the capabilities of the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft before a manned trip scheduled, in principle, for 2024.
The SLS rocket, taller than a 30-story building (322 feet or 98 meters), It has cost NASA about 4,000 million dollars.
The NASA He had to delay the departure of the mission four times, two for technical reasons and another two for meteorological reasons.
The overall goal of NASA’s Artemis program is to return humans to the moon for the first time in half a century and the Artemis I mission, expected to be the first of many, will lay the groundwork, testing the rocket and spacecraft and all their subsystems to ensure they are safe enough for astronauts to fly to the moon and back.