NASA will take one other crack at fueling up its large Artemis 2 moon rocket this week.
The company plans to load greater than 700,000 gallons (2.65 million liters) of liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LOX) into Artemis 2’s House Launch System (SLS) rocket on Thursday (Feb. 19), wrapping up an important two-day-long check referred to as a moist gown rehearsal.
The LH2 leak occurred at an interface with the tail service mast umbilical (TSMU), a service line that connects the SLS with its mobile launch tower.
This was far from unprecedented. Artemis 1’s test campaign was plagued by leaks in this area as well, which helped push the uncrewed mission’s launch from spring 2022 to November of that year. All ended well, however: Artemis 1 successfully sent an Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back to Earth.
Artemis 2 teams replaced two seals in the aftermath of the first wet dress. Then, on Feb. 12, they partially filled SLS’ tanks with LH2 in a “confidence test” designed to assess the efficacy of that fix. A problem with ground support equipment restricted the flow of LH2 during that test, but the team nonetheless was “able to gain confidence in several key objectives,” NASA wrote in an update on Feb. 13.
Artemis 2 workforce members quickly tied the ground-support situation to a filter, which they changed over this previous weekend. They now really feel able to conduct one other moist gown rehearsal, which can run via the important thing operations main as much as launch.
The moist gown will formally start at the moment (Feb. 17) at 6:40 p.m. EST (2340 GMT), when workforce members arrive at their stations on the Launch Management Middle at NASA’s Kennedy House Middle (KSC) in Florida. They’re going to work towards a simulated launch time of 8:30 p.m. EST on Thursday (Feb. 17; 0130 GMT on Feb. 18).
“Throughout the rehearsal, the workforce will execute an in depth countdown sequence. Operators will conduct two runs of the final 10 minutes of the countdown, often known as terminal depend. They may pause at T-1 minute and 30 seconds for as much as three minutes, then resume till T-33 seconds earlier than launch and pause once more,” NASA officers wrote in an update on Monday (Feb. 16).
“After that, they are going to recycle the clock again to T-10 minutes and conduct a second terminal countdown to simply inside T-30 seconds earlier than ending the sequence,” they added. “This course of simulates real-world situations, together with eventualities the place a launch may be scrubbed on account of technical or climate points.”
If all goes nicely, Artemis 2 might launch from KSC as early as March 6. There are a couple of different dates obtainable subsequent month as nicely — March 7-9 and March 11. (The company had additionally eyed March 3 as an choice, however that is not in play, in line with Monday’s replace.)
Artemis 2 will ship 4 astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian House Company — on a 10-day journey across the moon and again to Earth.
The mission is designed to show out the crew-carrying capabilities of SLS and Orion and pave the way in which for moon-landing missions, starting with Artemis 3, which might launch as quickly as 2028.
