NASA has announced a date for the second wet dress rehearsal for the SLS rocket that will send a crew of astronauts on a voyage around the moon in the highly anticipated Artemis II mission.
The space agency also confirmed that the earliest the rocket could launch is Friday, March 6.
NASA is now targeting Thursday, February 19, for the fueling part of the wet dress rehearsal at the Kennedy Space Center launch site in Florida.
The rehearsal is a key part of flight preparation and involves engineers fueling the rocket and going through the entire launch procedure short of actually igniting the engines.
During the first Artemis II rehearsal at the start of this month, engineers spotted a hydrogen leak at the base of the SLS rocket, prompting the team to ditch the target launch date of February 8 while it addressed the issue.
NASA said that it will only announce a new target launch date once the results of the second wet dress rehearsal have been fully assessed, but said the rocket would not lift off before March 6.
“The wet dress rehearsal will run the launch team as well as supporting teams through a full range of operations, including loading cryogenic liquid propellant 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 the launch controllers will arrive at their consoles in the Launch Control Center at Kennedy at 6:40 p.m. ET on Tuesday to start the nearly 50-hour countdown. The simulated launch time is 8:30 p.m. on Thursday.
The Artemis II mission will send NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch, together with the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day flight around the moon aboard the Orion spacecraft. It’ll be the first crewed lunar-bound flight since the final Apollo mission in 1972.
The mission will test the spacecraft’s systems and deep-space operations to validate them for future crewed moon missions and lunar landings.