NASA has announced a date for the second dress rehearsal for the SLS rocket, which will send a crew of astronauts on a trip around the moon as part of the highly anticipated Artemis II mission.
The space agency also confirmed that the earliest the rocket could launch would be Friday, March 6.
NASA is now planning Thursday, February 19, for the fuel portion of the wet dress rehearsal at the Kennedy Space Center launch site in Florida.
The rehearsal is an important part of flight preparation and involves engineers fueling the rocket and going through the entire launch process until they actually fire the engines.
During the first Artemis II rehearsal earlier this month, engineers discovered a hydrogen leak at the base of the SLS rocket, leading the team to abandon the planned launch date of February 8 while they dealt with the problem.
NASA said it would not announce a new planned launch date until the results of the second dress rehearsal were fully evaluated, but said the rocket would not lift off before March 6.
“The wet dress rehearsal will take the launch team and support teams through a full range of operations, including loading cryogenic liquid fuel into the SLS rocket’s tanks, conducting a launch countdown, demonstrating the ability to recycle the countdown clock, and draining the tanks to practice scrub procedures,” NASA said in a post on its website on Monday.
It added that launch controllers will arrive at their consoles at the Launch Control Center in Kennedy at 6:40 p.m. ET on Tuesday to begin the nearly 50-hour countdown. The simulated start time is Thursday at 8:30 p.m.
The Artemis II mission will send NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch, along with Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, on a 10-day flight around the moon aboard the Orion spacecraft. It will be the first manned flight to the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972.
The mission will test the spacecraft’s systems and space operations to validate it for future manned lunar missions and lunar landings.
