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The Artemis program will undergo a critical test this weekend that will mark the development of the next manned lunar missions of the NASA. This is known as the ‘wet dress rehearsal’, in which the megarocket Space Launch System (SLS) will light up until the traditional countdown. But not to be launched, but to test that all systems are ready for the next mission Artemis 1which will launch from Cape Canaveral on a date not yet specified from next June.
This is a test that will last three days on launch pad 39B, from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
The SLS is mounted there together with the crew capsule Orionwhere it is planned that in the missions Artemis II and III the first astronauts of the program that will return to our satellite are launched. It involves checking that all systems are working and verifying all mission steps of an actual launch, but without the launch itself.
The rehearsal, which will last 45 hours in total, will officially begin at 5 pm EDT (23 Spanish time) with the ‘call to the stations’. “It is a great milestone, because it is the moment when we call our teams, notifying them that the wet dress rehearsal is officially underway,” he explained in a previous conference. Charlie Blackwell-Thompson of KSC, NASA’s Artemis Launch Director for Exploration.
For the next 24 hours, members of the Artemis I mission team will perform a series of tasks from filling the launch pad’s sound suppression system water tanks, to powering up the Orion capsule and the SLS core stage. However, the critical part of the test will take place on Sunday, when tests such as the pumping of 3.2 million liters of propellant into the SLS’s tanks will take place.
Around 8:25 p.m. on Sunday (Spanish time), the launch director will poll the team members and ask them if they are ready to start the countdown, according to NASA in a statement explaining step by step what will happen during the proof. However, the count will not end at the usual ‘0’, but 33 seconds earlier. Afterwards, the equipment will restart the countdown again, this time stopping at 10 seconds.
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The results of the trial will be communicated at a subsequent press conference, on Monday at 17 PM (Spanish time). In it, NASA may give additional details about the future of Artemis I (whose launch date is not yet closed), the first of the missions that, although it will not be manned, will mark the beginning of the new ‘conquest’ of the Moon. , in which it is intended to create a stable human base.
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