NASA will make a second attempt to launch its Artemis 1 mission, within a 2-hour window on September 3, the US space agency announced on Tuesday (local time).
The window will open at 2:17pm EDT (11:47pm IST) on the new launch date, it added.
“We’re now targeting Saturday, Sept. 3 for the launch of the #Artemis I flight test around the Moon. The two-hour launch window opens at 2:17 p.m. ET,” NASA said in a tweet.
Meanwhile, the official Twitter handle of Artemis 1 said, “Teams have reviewed the data from Monday’s launch attempt of the #Artemis I mission and are moving forward with a second launch attempt on Sat., Sept. 3, with a two-hour launch window starting at 2:17 p.m. EDT.
NASA scientists will try to blast off the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket – the mission’s carrier vehicle – from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
When was the first attempt made and what happened to it?
The launch of Artemis 1 on the initial date – August 29 – was postponed as the teams could not get the rocket’s engines to the proper temperature range required to start the engines at liftoff, and ultimately ran out of time in the launch window, also of 2 hours, to continue.
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The mission management team met a day later to review the data collected from the first attempt, and to discuss the next course of action, a NASA press release said.
The Artemis 1 mission
Artemis 1 represents the first of NASA’s several upcoming and ‘increasingly complex’ missions, all under its Artemis programme, which aims to build a ‘long-term human presence at the Moon for decades to come’.
Under this, the agency will send the first woman and first person of colour to the lunar surface, for a period of six weeks, or, specifically, 42 days, 3 hours and 20 minutes.