The United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has again postponed the launch mission of Artemis 1. The reason is now the meteorological factor that produced the storm.
NASA earlier Friday (9/23) had targeted the launch on Tuesday (9/27) for the Artemis 1 mission from Kennedy Space Center (KSC).
NASA officials said there was a storm in the Caribbean called Tropical Depression 9 as of the launch date, quoted by the official blog NASA.
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Tropical Depression 9 degenerated into a tropical storm on Friday night and is expected to get stronger as it moves north, and is expected to hit Florida in the middle of next week.
NASA certainly doesn’t want Artemis 1’s billion-dollar pile off the asphalt during a hurricane, so it’s likely to lead it to Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) protection.
“During the meeting on Saturday morning, the team decided to step back in preparation for Tuesday’s launch date to allow them to configure the system by launching the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft into the Vehicle Assembly Building.” , NASA officials wrote in this update.
NASA further explained that engineers are postponing final launch decisions until Sunday (25/9), for further data collection and analysis.
Artemis 1 is the first mission of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a permanent human presence on the moon by the late 1920s.
Artemis 1 will send an unmanned journey into the lunar orbit and back to Earth. Hopefully, Artemis 2 will launch astronauts around the moon in 2024 and Artemis 3 will put their boots near the moon’s south pole in 2025 or 2026.
Artemis 1 has been in the launch area of KSC’s Launch Pad 39B since mid-August. NASA initially attempted to launch missions on August 29 and September 3, but both times failed due to technical problems.
A problem occurred on 3 September due to a leak of liquid hydrogen propellant between the SLS center stage and the rocket’s mobile launch tower. The mission team solved the problem by replacing the two seals in the affected area.
The effectiveness of the rocket repair was demonstrated during a refueling test, Wednesday (9/21), according to reports Space.
(can / lth)
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