NASA began final preparations for the Artemis 2 mission in early January, with its launch window expected to open by February 6. After problems surfaced during the mission’s wet dress rehearsal in the early hours of February 3, the agency had to postpone its initial launch opportunity until March.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on X, “With more than three years between SLS launches, we fully expected to encounter challenges. That’s why we conduct wet dress rehearsals. These tests are designed to uncover issues before flight and determine the launch day with the highest probability of success.”
During wet dress rehearsal, the spacecraft to be used for a mission is loaded with propellants to simulate actual preparations and the countdown to takeoff. NASA reported that Artemis 2’s Space Launch System, which was already on the launch pad, was suffering from a liquid hydrogen leak, which took its engineers hours to resolve. Eventually they succeeded in filling all the rocket’s tanks and began the countdown to launch. But with about five minutes remaining in the countdown, the ground launch sequencer automatically shut down due to an increase in the spacecraft’s liquid hydrogen leakage rate.
The agency admits it has other issues to fix based on what happened during rehearsals. He must ensure that cold weather during the actual launch does not affect the mission instruments in the same way as it did in the test. The Orion Crew Module’s hatch pressurization process took longer than expected, and should not have happened on launch day. NASA also had to troubleshoot audio communication channels for its ground teams after several collapses during rehearsals. Artemis’ ground crew will review the wet dress rehearsal data and resolve the above issues. NASA would then have to conduct another test to confirm that they were taken care of before announcing the mission’s launch window.
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