NASA says it will try to launch its new Moon rocket on Saturday, after an attempt at a lift-off on Monday had to be scrapped when one of four engines on the vehicle did not cool down to its required operating temperature.
After reviewing and considering data, NASA scientists and engineers are of the belief that they now understand why the issue occurred.
The NASA staff believe the issue is likely related to an inaccurate sensor reading. NASA engineers feel can develop a strategy to deal with the problem on launch day – this involves starting the process of chilling the engines earlier in the countdown.
“We’ve got a path forward to get to where we need to get to, to support the next launch,” said John Honeycutt, who manages the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket project at NASA.
Saturday’s launch will be set for 14:17 local time (18:17 GMT; 19:17 BST) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Controllers are set to be granted two hours to get the rocket off Earth.
According to CNN, the reason for Monday’s scrub was not related to the engine itself (Engine Number 3), but rather with the system that conditions it for flight. The power unit mustn’t be shocked by the sudden injection of super-cold propellants; it must instead be brought down slowly to the correct operating temperature (-250C) before launch by bleeding through some liquid hydrogen from the core-stage tank above.
The engineering team plans to initiate the cool down process about 45 minutes earlier in Saturday’s countdown. They hope this will bring everything into line.
“We are going to try to launch on the third (September). And, you know, coming into this prior attempt, yesterday’s attempt, we said that if we couldn’t thermally condition the engines we wouldn’t launch, and that’s the same posture that we’re going into Saturday,” said Mike Sarafin, Nasa’s Artemis mission manager.
