Miami (USA), Apr 3 (EFE) .- NASA suspended the fuel load test scheduled for this Sunday as part of a general general rehearsal of the next lunar mission Artemis 1 at the Kennedy Space Center in Cabo due to a technical problem. Canaveral (Florida).
“The teams have decided to eliminate tanking operations for the wet dress rehearsal due to the loss of ability to pressurize the mobile launcher,” the space agency explained in a blog post dedicated to the Artemis program.
Without that capability, which prevents the entry of dangerous gases, “technicians cannot safely proceed with loading propellants into the rocket’s core stage and interim cryogenic propulsion stage,” NASA added in a brief message.
“The next opportunity to continue tanking is Monday, April 4,” he stressed.
This weekend’s dress rehearsal began on April 1 and included a full launch countdown and the loading of 700,000 gallons of supercold liquid oxygen and propellant liquid hydrogen into the rocket’s tanks.
Artemis 1 is NASA’s first mission under the Artemis program, which aims to bring astronauts to the Moon by 2025.
The first mission, for which there is no date yet, will be an unmanned trip around the Moon to test the Space Launch System and its Orion crew capsule, which carries an experiment suite and a dummy covered with sensors.
Hours before the suspension of the fuel load, in the early hours of the morning local time (11:20 GMT), those responsible for the mission had given the green light to continue with the general test, once it had been verified that the rocket had not suffered damage. because of several lightning strikes on the Kennedy Space Center launch pad where it is located.
Four lightning strikes struck the area around launch pad 39B on Saturday, the first of which were of relatively low power and the fourth was more powerful and struck one of the three lightning towers.
The rocket is protected from lightning by these towers topped by a fiberglass mast and linked by a catenary cable that deflects the impacts to the ground, according to the specialized website Space.com.
“One of the strikes last night was the strongest we’ve seen since we installed the new lightning protection system,” Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of NASA’s Ground Exploration Systems, wrote via Twitter.
“It hit the catenary cable that runs between the three towers. The system worked extremely well and kept the SLS rocket and Orion safe,” the Artemis 1 mission spacecraft, he added.
At the time of the lightning strikes, the center of the rocket and the Orion spacecraft at its tip were on, but the side-mounted solid rocket boosters and a temporary cryogenic propulsion stage were off, according to the information. POT. EFE
ar / amg
© EFE 2022. The redistribution and rebroadcasting of all or part of the contents of Efe’s services is expressly prohibited, without the prior and express consent of Agencia EFE SA