Olufemi Adeyemi
NASA is targeting the launch of the SLS rocket, mounted with the Orion spacecraft, on August 29 when the launch window opens at 6:03 am IST.
The space agency on Monday cleared its Artemis 1 mission to launch an uncrewed test flight around the moon next week. Liftoff is scheduled for Monday, Aug. 29, during a two-hour window that opens at 8:33 a.m. EDT (1233 GMT).
The historic mission, the first of NASA's Artemis program
that aims to return astronauts to the moon, will lift off from Pad 36B at the
Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be the first flight of Space Launch
System (SLS) megarocket, NASA's most powerful rocket ever, and a critical test
of its Orion spacecraft.
"We are go for launch, which is absolutely outstanding,"
NASA associate administrator Robert Cabana told reporters in a press conference
Monday night. "This day has been a long time coming."
Artemis 1 will launch an 322-foot (98 meters) SLS megarocket
and its Orion capsule on a 42-day mission to circle the moon and return to
Earth.
NASA is billing the test flight as its first mission back to
the moon with a crew-capable spacecraft in nearly 50 years. It's also NASA's
first new vehicle of its own since the agency retired its space shuttle fleet
over a decade ago.
According to NASA's plan, Artemis 1 will lift off from Pad
39B — the same launch pad used by the Apollo 10 mission to orbit the moon in
1969, as well as Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions — and take about a week to
reach lunar orbit. It will stay there for about a month before returning to
Earth on Oct. 10.
That assumes everything will go perfectly with the flight.
NASA has made it clear that things can go wrong.
"This is the first flight of a new rocket and a new
spacecraft," Mike Sarafin, NASA's Artemis 1 mission manager, told
reporters. "We're doing something that is incredibly difficult to do and
does carry inherent risk in it."
Mission managers said Monday that they intend to push the
four-person Orion spacecraft hard, going beyond parameters the agency has set
for crewed flights, to ensure the spacecraft gets put through its paces.
The mission's marathon 42-day length is longer than the
standard 10-day or so Artemis crewed flights NASA has planned. That will give
NASA and the European Space Agency, which built Orion's service module, time
identify any issues to address for the first crewed flight.
Orion is also carrying a "Moonikin" mannequin and
humanoid torsos covered with sensors to measure the effects of vibration and
space radiation on the human body, while 10 small cubesats will be deployed
from the SLS during the flight to test new Artemis exploration technologies.
"We are pushing the vehicle to its limits, really
stressing it to get ready for crew," Sarafin said.
That crewed flight is Artemis 2, which NASA hopes to fly in
2024. Artemis 3, the first Artemis moon landing with a crew, is targeted for
2025 and will use a SpaceX Starship lander to fly astronauts to one of 13
candidate sites at the moon's south pole. But both those missions, of course,
depend on how Artemis 1 turns out.
NASA currently has three chances to launch Artemis 1 in its
current flight window, which opens on Aug. 29. The backup days are Sept. 2 and
Sept. 5, with NASA expected to outline its launch strategy later this week on
Saturday (Aug. 27) after a Launch Readiness Review meeting.
There's still some work to do on the SLS rocket before it
will be ready to flight.
NASA launch test director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said
launch crews have two final close-out tests to work through, one on the
rocket's twin solid rocket boosters (larger versions of the ones used on NASA
shuttles) and another on the connections between the SLS rocket and its mobile
launch platform.
The team does have one critical test to verify a fix to a
leak spotted in a June fueling test during a kickstart phase to prepare the
rocket's engines for its super-chilled propellant. That test can only be
performed on launch day.
"That is something that we're going to demonstrate in
the end for the first time on the day of launch, and if we do not successfully
demonstrate that we are not going to launch that day," Sarafin said.
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