An uncrewed test of NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft moved a step closer to launch with the completion of a flight readiness review Aug. 22. NASA officials said late Aug. 22 that the review confirmed plans for a launch of the Artemis 1 mission from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B as soon as 8:33 a.m. Eastern Aug. 29, at the beginning of a two-hour window. A second two-hour window is available Sept. 2, and a 90-minute window Sept. 5. “We had no exceptions today. We actually had no actions coming out of the review and we had no dissenting opinions,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said at a briefing after the review. There is still some “open work” to do on the SLS and Orion spacecraft before launch, said Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager at NASA. Some of that is planned work to prepare the vehicles for launch, “largely things that we have a path to close before we go fly.” One issue that won’t be checked until the final stages of the countdown is a step called the “hydrogen kickstart” to thermally condition the engines. That could not be tested during the series of wet dress rehearsals of the vehicle in April and June because a leak in a hydrogen bleed line detected in the final rehearsal in June. Sarafin and Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director, said there is a plan to test that step during a “quiescent” phase in the countdown a few hours before launch once the core stage’s liquid hydrogen tank is filled. “We believe that we have taken all the actions to correct that problem,” Blackwell-Thompson said, but won’t know for certain until the test at the pad.
The first launch of the Space Launch System remains on schedule for as soon as Aug. 29 after the Artemis 1 mission passed its flight readiness review Aug. 22. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
“If we do not successfully demonstrate that,” Sarafin said, “we are not going to launch that day.”
A launch on Aug. 29 would start what is scheduled to be a 42-day mission for the Orion spacecraft. The SLS’s upper stage will place the spacecraft on a trajectory to the moon, called translunar injection (TLI), less than two hours after liftoff. Orion will fly by the moon five days later, maneuvering into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon. After spending two weeks in that orbit, the spacecraft will maneuver back to the moon, performing another powered flyby to bring it back to Earth, splashing down off coast of San Diego, California Oct. 10.
The six-week mission is a stress test of sorts of the spacecraft. Howard Hu, NASA Orion program manager, noted that Orion is designed to support a four-person crew for three weeks. “This mission allows us to push a lot of capability,” he said. “The long-class mission we’re talking about, 42 days, will allow us to stress a lot of systems.”
“Going 42 days puts a lot more stress on those systems, plus the environment it’s in — longer exposure to radiation, longer exposure to micrometeoroid hits — means we’re going to learn a lot from this test flight,” said Bob Cabana, NASA associate administrator. “We’re stressing it beyond what it is designed for and we’ll see what we learn.”
Cabana and others at the briefing emphasized that Artemis 1 was a test flight. “It’s not without risk,” he said. That includes scenarios, he said, where Orion is not able to complete the planned mission and returns early.
NASA, though, will push to at least send Orion towards the moon to enable the mission’s top objective, testing the spacecraft’s heat shield at lunar reentry velocities of about 40,000 kilometers per hour. That includes pressing ahead with TLI even if there are issues with the spacecraft, like a solar panel that doesn’t properly deploy immediately after launch.
“We have a lean-forward strategy to get our high-priority objective, which is to demonstrate the heat shield at lunar reentry conditions,” said Sarafin. “We’re going to press to the point of translunar injection unless we’re sure we’re going to lose the vehicle.”
“We would be go on this flight for conditions that we would normally be no-go for on a crewed flight in the interest of crew safety, because we want to buy down risk,” he added.
The launch of a NASA mission to the asteroid Psyche has been delayed at least a month and a half because of a problem with the spacecraft’s software, the agency confirmed May 23. In a brief statement to SpaceNews, NASA said it has delayed the launch of the Psyche spacecraft, previously scheduled for Aug. 1, until no earlier than Sept. 20 to address the problem. The delay was first reported by Spaceflight Now. “An issue is preventing confirmation that the software controlling the spacecraft is functioning as planned. The team is working to identify and correct the issue,” the agency said in a statement, but did not elaborate on the specific issue or how it is being corrected. NASA did not immediately respond to follow-up questions, including the duration of the launch window. NASA has not yet formally announced the slip in the launch. The website for the mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory still lists an Aug. 1 launch for the mission as of early May 24. The last agency update on the mission, published May 2, discussed the spacecraft’s shipment from JPL to the Kennedy Space Center to begin preparations for its launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. “Not yet public, we’re working on it,” tweeted Lindy Elkins-Tanton, principal investigator for the mission at Arizona State University, in response to a question May 23 about the delay and the mission’s launch window.
NASA's Psyche spacecraft, which recently arrived at the Kennedy Space Center to begin launch preparations, will now launch no earlier than Sept. 20, a delay of more than a month and a half. Credit: NASA/Isaac Watson
NASA selected Psyche in January 2017 as one of two Discovery-class planetary science missions, along with the Lucy mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. At the time of selection, Psyche was scheduled to launch in 2023 and arrive at the main belt asteroid Psyche in 2030. However, NASA and the project agreed to move up the launch one year, revising its trajectory to allow it to arrive at Psyche in 2026 after a Mars flyby in 2023.
Psyche the spacecraft will orbit Psyche the asteroid for at least 21 months, studying the large, metallic asteroid that may be the remnant of a protoplanetary core. The spacecraft will also test a payload called Deep Space Optical Communication that uses lasers to provide high-bandwidth communications with Earth.
At the mission’s Key Decision Point C review in 2019, NASA estimated a total lifecycle cost of $996.4 million for Psyche. A Government Accountability Office report a year ago on cost and schedule performance of NASA programs stated that the mission’s estimated cost had since declined slightly, to $957.6 million, reflecting the cost of the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle NASA selected for the mission in 2020.
JPL is responsible for overall management of Psyche, including engineering, integration and testing. Maxar built the spacecraft bus.
Once the changes have been reviewed and approved by program engineering and management, the new values will be given to the SLS flight software team to be updated in the Green Run Application Software (GRAS) that is running on the Core Stage’s three flight computers. The limits are part of thousands of operational and other system parameters that can be modified without needing to make an invasive code change. “We use the same process that we would use for the Day Of Launch I-Load Update (DOLILU), we use that same process,” Mitchell said. “It’s a capability that we can use to modify parameters within the flight software. By design, we wanted to make that process as easy and straightforward so that it could support a quick turnaround if you got into a situation where you’re having some troubles with a limit that was too tight.” I-load stands for “initialization load,” which is essentially a settings file that the software can load to update groups of parameters. “These are parameters that are part of a parameter control file where we manage over 10,000 different parameters that can be modified in flight software. We’ll make those tweaks to change those limit levels [and] we’ll generate an I-load file that can then be uploaded.” “[It’s] a pretty rapid process, and we’ve advertised with the KSC (Kennedy Space Center) folks that that’s a process that we can turnaround in about three or four days. And so that’s the same process that we’ll execute for making these parameter changes going into the next Hot-Fire attempt.”
Much of that time is still needed to ensure that the changes “do no harm,” by first testing the parameter control file changes on a separate set of computers in a test lab at the Marshall Space Flight Center. “We will test it to make sure that it works with the changes as expected. You always want to make sure that it did no harm when you make that change.”
The regression testing will verify that the parameter changes are input to the flight software correctly, that only the specific values are changed and not something else, and that no other unintended side effects occur when the file is loaded by the flight software.
(Photo Caption: The four Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines in the SLS Core Stage start during the Hot-Fire test on January 16. The engines operated normally during the test-firing, the first time the former Space Shuttle Main Engines had been throttled up to 109% power. A bad reading in one sensor value on Engine 4 during startup was quickly disqualified by its engine controller and was unrelated to the later abort of the test.)
In contrast, a code change would require more work and take longer to complete. “Without having to do a code change, we can turnaround the creation of [an] I-load file, the specific parameter change testing, in a couple of general regression tests to show proof that it did no harm.”
“The last thing we would want to do is make a code change for something like this because then you get into more extensive process and regression testing that instead of three or four days can easily go to maybe two to four weeks depending on what the change is.”
Vehicle in good shape post-firing
NASA reported that the Core Stage itself was in good shape after the short test-firing. The extra thermal protection system (TPS) layer for the Green Run Hot-Fire also appears to be in good condition.
A layer of reflective foil was applied to the bottom of the stage’s boattail and any other down-facing hardware in the area to protect against the higher heating expected in an eight-minute long static-firing. Within a few minutes of flight, the stage would be out of the appreciable atmosphere; instead, during a continuous static-firing at sea-level, the vehicle is subjected to extra heating and acoustic effects.
The Core Stage CAPUs also exhaust hydrogen gas while they are powered by the running engines. During the engine start and shutdown sequences, groups of hydrogen burn-off igniters are fired make sure that hydrogen gas from the engines or the CAPUs doesn’t build up to dangerous levels.
“Before we light off the engines, we [use] the hydrogen burn off igniters, the sparklers if you will,” Terry Prickett, NASA’s Deputy Chief Engineer for the SLS Core Stage, said. “We actually have dedicated sparklers that are shooting up into this area to ignite the CAPU exhaust so we don’t get a build up of the hydrogen gas and have a big pop event [that would] overpressurize that area.”
Prickett added that once the engines are up and running, they would then consume the CAPU’s hydrogen gas exhaust. “We would expect it to get entrained in the aspiration flow that’s coming down around the vehicle down through the flame bucket,” he said.
(Photo Caption: Residual hydrogen gas is consumed by hydrogen burn-off igniters after the engines shut down in the January 16 Hot-Fire test. The outside igniters are deployed around the bottom of the stage and its engines and are fired to allow a controlled burn of free hydrogen gas in the area rather than letting it build up and ignite all at once during engine startup and shutdown in the test stand at Stennis.)
In the test stand at Stennis, the hydrogen burn-off igniters are run not only before and during engine startup but also during and after the engines and CAPUs shutdown.
The other TPS system around the engines are the engine mounted heat shield blankets that protect the engine section and the engine powerheads while the engines are running during a Hot-Fire test and also during launch when the Solid Rocket Boosters are burning on either side of the Core Stage.
The blankets are multi-layer insulation designed to handle the severe launch environment, but they also have an outer layer to protect against moisture instead of combustion. “The outermost layer is a thin, waterproofing barrier and the inner layers are insulation material,” Prickett said.
“The outer layer was expected to be consumed during the Hot-Fire, and like I say, it has no effect on the insulating capability of the blanket, it’s just there for a moisture barrier — a weather cover, if you will — while we’re sitting out there on the stand for months at a time. We don’t want rain and moisture getting into those blankets.”
“As far as how it looks afterwards, the moisture barriers are torn up and burned, there’s some burning that we saw on those, but the insulating part of the blankets looked intact and no damage basically at all on those,” he added.
Since the firing only lasted for about a minute, NASA and Boeing are still discussing whether they needed to do any work on the blankets before the second Hot-Fire. A new, fresh set of blankets will be installed for launch.
Stage and engines have reserves for another test-firing
NASA had planned to conduct more propellant loadings of the first flight Core Stage as a part of the Green Run campaign at Stennis and first-time launch integration activities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In addition to filling the Core Stage with propellant for the Wet Dress Rehearsal and Hot-Fire tests for Green Run, a full SLS vehicle WDR is planned at KSC to demonstrate and verify the integrated launch vehicle and ground system capabilities.
At a minimum, propellant loading for a launch countdown was expected to be the fourth cryogenic cycle on the Core Stage. The Core can be loaded and unloaded (with one load and one unload counting as a single cryo cycle) a total of 23 times per the design.
“Before Green Run testing began, SLS had allocated nine cryogenic cycles for testing at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and has used two of those during the Hot-Fire and Wet Dress Rehearsal, with seven cryogenic cycles remaining for additional testing. For the Artemis I launch, NASA is preserving 13 of the remaining 20 cryogenic loading cycles,” another NASA blog post said.
“There are some differences in the way we count [cryogenic loading] cycles on this program versus what we did on External Tank,” Prickett noted. “All these cycles go into a big spectrum that the tank is going to see, so we book-keep them as major cycles and minor cycles and it’s a combination of cryo and pressure.”
“There’s a little bit of difference here in the fact that on Shuttle we loaded against pressure, so we pressurized the tanks and then we loaded them. On [SLS], we do not do that.”
Likewise, the Stage Green Run testing was initially planned to be more expansive, and Aerojet Rocketdyne prepared the four RS-25 engines assigned to this first SLS Core Stage as well as the next engine set for the second Core for the possibility of additional pre-launch testing. Early plans to conduct two Green Run campaigns on the first two Core Stages and to perform two Hot-Fire tests in each one were scaled back over time.
“We had a ‘six-six, three-three’ requirement,” Aerojet Rocketdyne’s Doug Bradley said in an interview in 2020; at the time, he was RS-25 Deputy Program Director for the company. “That means, the first two flights– they had to be good for six tests or [firings] without any real changes in how we had to inspect them. The next two [flights] would be three.”
(Photo Caption: The four RS-25 engines are seen following shutdown after the January 16 test. The white heat shield thermal protection blankets above the engine nozzles have a thin, outer water-barrier cover that was expected to be burned over the course of a full, eight minute engine firing; however, they appear to have survived one minute of firing with less damage.)
“At one time, there were going to be two Core Stage tests on the engines. And so we put an abort in for both of those; that gets you up to four,” he explained. “Then we said ‘put in an on-the-pad abort for the flight’ and then the flight, so we came up with six. Then we said, ‘after you do the first two [flights], you’re not going to be doing two [ground tests] any more,’ so we said three.”
Following the first Hot-Fire, during the refurbishment and turnaround process to get the engines ready for the second Hot-Fire, an issue with the readings from one of four Main Combustion Chamber pressure sensors on Engine 4 was also repaired. The measurement from that sensor was “noisy” during engine startup, and that sensor was disqualified by the engine controller 1.5 seconds after the start command.
The noisy data was not due to a bad sensor but was somewhere within the wire harness that carries the data from the sensor to the engine controller. The issue was not serious enough to either shutdown the engine or to stop the ground test from continuing and was unrelated to the issue that stopped the test over 60 seconds later.
While not an issue for the Hot-Fire test, such a noisy start on one sensor on a single engine would have resulted in an on-pad abort per flight safety rules that mandate full redundancy of the system at liftoff.
January Hot-Fire short, but many firsts demonstrated
Although there wasn’t much of a middle to the January 16 Hot-Fire, the test accomplished many SLS Program firsts: including the first time a Core Stage completed a launch countdown, the first four-engine start sequence, first steady-state run-time at 109%, and first safe engine shutdown.
“Even before engine start we got a lot of firsts,” Looser said. “If you remember in the second Wet Dress Rehearsal, we stopped at around the five minute mark, so [January 16] was the first time to go up to flight pressure on both of those tanks as we enter the terminal count. We demonstrated the engine start box, starting all four CAPUs, transitioning the engines into their final purge sequence, and then getting the engine ready command.”
“We [also demonstrated] a three-minute launch ready hold as we were working an issue just prior to engine start; so we demonstrated that launch-ready hold capability,” he added.
Many of the firsts in the January 16 test were under control of the brand new SLS flight software; after vehicle power went to internal batteries at T-90 seconds, the vehicle was virtually isolated from the test stand, and the flight computers took over control of the vehicle from Boeing’s Stage Controller ground computers at T-30 seconds and completed the Core Stage’s part of the final launch countdown.
“That was the first time we’ve been able to go through that T-4 minutes 40 seconds [mark] all the way to T0 and into plus count with the real vehicle,” Mitchell also added. “Of course we performed that testing thousands of times in the various labs.”
Once the engines came up before T0 and the engine tap-off gas was powering the CAPUs — another first for the program — the stage was running off its own resources under its own control.
“What’s interesting is that when you look at and understand all the interactions that need to happen between the Stage Controller and the test stand and the Stage Controller and stage working through the Green Run Application Software to configure the stage so that it can become a self-contained entity and for GRAS to take over and execute the Hot-Fire and how seamlessly that worked, there’s hundreds of activities that happened during those last four minutes to get to T0, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how that whole integrated system performed,” noted Mitchell.
“It provides us a lot of assurance, certainly for a second Hot-Fire, but also gives us a lot of confidence when we go to do integration at KSC.”
Weather has become a major concern for the planned launch of two American astronauts Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the first crewed mission from U.S. soil in nine years. The projected liftoff has a 60 percent of violating weather constraints because of a thick cloud cover and the likelihood that their SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket would fly through rain, Air Force meteorologists at nearly Patrick Air Force Base said Sunday. "On launch day, remnant moisture" from a tropical wave will remain in the area, according to the Launch Mission Execution Forecast. "The primary launch weather concerns remain flight through precipitation, the thick cloud layer rule and the cumulus cloud rule associated with the remnant tropical moisture and proximity of [a] developing low." A launch cannot occur if precipitation is occurring at the launch pad or within the flight path. Similarly a launch generally cannot occur if any part of the planned flight path is through a layer of clouds within 5 nautical miles and is 4,500 feet thick or thicker. Other parameters have to be met, as well. If the launch is scrubbed, NASA has said, the next attempt to send the Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station would come Saturday. Both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have announced they would attend the launch Wednesday, and it was not clear whether a postponement would change those plans to attend. Despite the dire weather forecast, astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken -- and the mission team -- participated in a "dry dress' rehearsal Saturday in which they donned their black and white spacesuits and made a 20-minute drive in a Tesla Model X to Launch Complex 39A.
Elon Musk, who operates SpaceX, also is the chief executive officer of Tesla.
Hurley and Behnken then took a service tower elevator to the spacecraft access arm gantry and climbed into the capsule. They checked out communication systems, and the hatch was closed. They then went through a run-through with all launch personnel.
According to the space agency, "the rehearsal concluded with the go/no-go poll for Falcon 9 propellant loading, which normally occurs 45 minutes before launch."
A day before the rehearsal, engineers successfully fired the rocket's nine Merlin first-stage engines for seven seconds in what NASA describes as a "critical but routine test."
The liftoff, should it occur Wednesday, is planned for 4:33 p.m. EDT. The Dragon capsule would dock with the International Space Station on Thursday at 11:29 a.m. EDT.
Engineers working on NASA's Perseverance rover mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida have begun the process of placing the Mars-bound rover and other spacecraft components into the configuration they'll be in as they ride on top of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. The launch period for the mission opens on July 17 - just 70 days from now. Called "vehicle stacking," the process began on April 23 with the integration of the rover and its rocket-powered descent stage. One of the first steps in the daylong operation was to lift the descent stage onto Perseverance so that engineers could connect the two with flight-separation bolts. When it's time for the rover to touch down on Mars, these three bolts will be released by small pyrotechnic charges, and the spacecraft will execute the sky crane maneuver: Nylon cords spool out through what are called bridle exit guides to lower the rover 25 feet (7.6 meters) below the descent stage. Once Perseverance senses it's on the surface, pyrotechnically-fired blades will sever the cords, and the descent stage flies off. The sky crane maneuver ensures Perseverance will land on the Martian surface free of any other spacecraft components, eliminating the need for a complex deployment procedure. "Attaching the rover to the descent stage is a major milestone for the team because these are the first spacecraft components to come together for launch, and they will be the last to separate when we reach Mars," said David Gruel, the Perseverance rover assembly, test, and launch operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages rover operations. "These two assemblies will remain firmly nestled together until they are about 65 feet [20 meters] over the surface of Mars."
On April 29, the rover and descent stage were attached to the cone-shaped back shell, which contains the parachute and, along with the mission's heat shield, provides protection for the rover and descent stage during Martian atmospheric entry.
Whether they are working on final assembly of the vehicle at Kennedy Space Center, testing software and subsystems at JPL or (as the majority of the team is doing) teleworking due to coronavirus safety precautions, the Perseverance team remains on track to meet the opening of the rover's launch period. No matter what day Perseverance launches, it will land at Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.
With the launch period of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover opening in 14 weeks, final preparations of the spacecraft continue at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In the past week, the assembly, test and launch operations team completed important milestones, fueling the descent stage - also known as the sky crane - and attaching the Mars Helicopter, which will be the first aircraft in history to attempt power-controlled flight on another planet. Over the weekend, 884 pounds (401 kilograms) of hydrazine monopropellant were loaded into the descent stage's four fuel tanks. As the aeroshell containing the descent stage and rover enter the Martian atmosphere on Feb. 18, 2021, the propellant will be pressure-fed through 120 feet (37 meters) of stainless steel and titanium tubing into eight Mars landing engines. The engines' job: to slow the spacecraft, which will be traveling at about 180 mph (80 meters per second) when it's 7,200 feet (2,200 meters) in altitude, to 1.7 mph (0.75 meter per second) by the time it's about 66 feet (20 meters) above the surface. Maintaining this rate of descent, the stage will then perform the sky crane maneuver: Nylon cords spool out to lower the rover 25 feet (7.6 meters) below the descent stage; When the spacecraft senses touchdown at Jezero Crater, the connecting cords are severed and the descent stage flies off. "The last hundred days before any Mars launch is chock-full of significant milestones," said David Gruel, the Mars 2020 assembly, test and launch operations manager at JPL. "Fueling the descent stage is a big step. While we will continue to test and evaluate its performance as we move forward with launch preparations, it is now ready to fulfill its mission of placing Perseverance on the surface on Mars."
The Helicopter After the descent stage fueling, the system that will deliver the Mars Helicopter to the surface of the Red Planet was integrated with Perseverance. The helicopter, which weighs 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms) and features propellers 4 feet (1.2 meters) in diameter, is cocooned within the delivery system.
In one of the first steps in the day-long process on April 6, technicians and engineers made 34 electrical connections between the rover, the helicopter and its delivery system on the rover's belly. After confirming data and commands could be sent and received, they attached the delivery system to the rover.
Finally, the team confirmed the helicopter could receive an electrical charge from the rover. Before being deployed onto the surface of Jezero Crater, the Mars Helicopter will rely on the rover for power. Afterward, it will generate its own electrical power through a solar panel located above its twin counter-rotating propellers.
The helicopter will remain encapsulated on the rover's belly for the next year and will be deployed around the beginning of May - roughly two-and-a-half months after Perseverance's landing. Once the rover drives about 330 feet (100 meters) away and the helicopter undergoes an extensive systems check, it will execute a flight-test campaign for up to 30 days.
The Perseverance rover is a robotic scientist weighing 2,260 pounds (1,025 kilograms). It will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet's climate and geology, collect samples for future return to Earth and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. No matter what day Perseverance launches during its July 17-Aug. 5 launch period, it will land on Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.
The Orion spacecraft that will fly on the Artemis 1 mission around the Moon has returned to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, after finishing space environment tests. The spacecraft, including ESA's European Service Module, is now at its final destination before launch. Orion spent four months at NASA's Plum Brook station where it was subjected to the vacuum and temperatures of -175C to 75C it will experience on its flight to the Moon. After proving its space-worthiness, the electronics - including the thousands of parameters and functions of the European Service Module that control the engines, electrical power and steering the solar panels to face the Sun - were checked for electromagnetic interference. ESA's Dominique Siruguet from the European Service Module integration and verification team says "The tests were successful and the behaviour of the vehicle was good, passing all requirements." Plum Brook station was chosen for the tests because thermal vacuum and electromagnetic compatibility could be performed in the same facility. This avoided additional transport of Orion, which is the size of a two-story house. Having passed its trials, the spacecraft was wrapped and moved by truck to an airport in Ohio for its return flight on NASA's Super Guppy aircraft.
Adding wings to Orion The tests are not completely over for Orion, at Kennedy Space Center the crew module will be further prepared and more leak tests conducted. The European Service Module has tanks for fuel, oxygen and water that are critical for the astronauts. The gas tanks are pressurised and are connected to many pipes and valves, so it vital to make sure there are no leaks.
The solar wings that generate power during its mission will be installed, as well as protective covers called the Spacecraft Adapter Jettisoned fairings for the intense moments of launch on the world's most powerful rocket.
Later this year ESA will formally transfer ownership of the European Service Module to NASA and the spacecraft will move into the ground system phase where it will be united with the SLS rocket for a lift-off to the Moon.
Orion is a key component of Artemis 1 - an uncrewed test flight around the Moon that paves the way for the Artemis 3 mission, which will land the first woman and next man on the lunar surface by 2024. ESA is designing and supplying the European Service Module for the Orion spacecraft. This provides electricity, water, oxygen and nitrogen. It also keeps the spacecraft at the right temperature and on course, propelling it to the Moon and back once it has separated from the launcher.
Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft is transported from NASA's Kennedy Space Center to a facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2019. Later in the day it was placed atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket ahead of Boeing's uncrewed Orbital Flight Test to the International Space Station. Boeing's uncrewed flight test, which is targeted for Dec. 17, will provide valuable data on the end-to-end performance of the rocket, spacecraft and ground systems, as well as, in-orbit and landing operations. The data will be used toward certification of Boeing's crew transportation system for carrying astronauts to and from the space station. NASA's Commercial Crew Program is working with the American aerospace industry through public-private partnerships to launch astronauts on American rockets and spacecraft from American soil for the first time since 2011. The goal of the program is safe, reliable and cost-effective human space transportation to and from the International Space Station. This could allow for additional research time aboard the station and increase the opportunity for discovery aboard humanity's testbed for exploration, which includes sending astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
A NASA and Department of Defense team returned from a week of training at sea to improve joint landing and recovering operations planned for crew aboard the agency's Orion spacecraft from future deep space exploration missions. Departing from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Exploration Ground Systems' team embarked on the USS John P. Murtha, an amphibious U.S. Navy ship, in the Pacific Ocean with the main goal of ensuring all of their recovery equipment was up to the task. This round of testing was known as Underway Recovery Test-7, or URT-7. Recovery ground support equipment includes the Orion Recovery Cradle Assembly, or ORCA, the cradle in which the spacecraft will ultimately set down; winch and rigging lines lovingly referred to as LLAMAs, short for Line Load Attenuating Mechanism Assembly; and even seemingly small items, such as tow pins. But ensuring all of the equipment works as planned and without damage to the spacecraft is no small task. The integrated recovery team worked in tandem to put the equipment through its paces this past week - and NASA's Jeremy Parr, lead design engineer, was on hand to evaluate testing. "We had an amazing week," Parr said when all the testing was done and the ship was headed back to shore. "From start to finish, we had some bumps, we took it slow and had some training days, but by the end of the week we were having almost perfect runs. And that's because of the sailors and LLAMA operators - everyone was working together as a team."
For the past five years, Parr and others have been working on the recovery concept. With the exception of the winch's control system, everything has been designed and built in-house at Kennedy under Parr's leadership - and it all passed muster.
The entire Landing and Recovery Team is led by NASA's Melissa Jones. During URT-7, she was pleased to see all of the team's hard work pay off. "Testing this week has gone extremely well," she said.
The team performed the first complete recovery at night, which lasted until the wee hours of the morning. Jones chocked that up to lessons learned on possible complications of night operations and working with the ship and divers out in the open water in less-than-optimal conditions.
"The team continues to amaze me with their intelligence, determination, and tireless work ethic," Jones said. "A huge thanks to the crew of the USS John P. Murtha for their help and hospitality. The success of this week would not have been possible without their positivity and can-do attitude."
The crew aren't the only ones with a positive attitude. Parr and the rest of the team are heading back to Kennedy with a renewed sense of accomplishment.
"I now have complete confidence in every piece of hardware that we have," Parr said. "We're ready to rock and roll for the recovery of Orion after Exploration Mission-1."
NASA's Parker Solar Probe has arrived in Florida to begin final preparations for its launch to the Sun, scheduled for July 31, 2018. In the middle of the night on April 2, the spacecraft was driven from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to nearby Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. From there, it was flown by the United States Air Force's 436th Airlift Wing to Space Coast Regional Airport in Titusville, Florida, where it arrived at 10:40 a.m. EDT. It was then transported a short distance to Astrotech Space Operations, also in Titusville, where it will continue testing, and eventually undergo final assembly and mating to the third stage of the Delta IV Heavy launch vehicle. Parker Solar Probe is humanity's first mission to the Sun. After launch, it will orbit directly through the solar atmosphere - the corona - closer to the surface than any human-made object has ever gone. While facing brutal heat and radiation, the mission will reveal fundamental science behind what drives the solar wind, the constant outpouring of material from the Sun that shapes planetary atmospheres and affects space weather near Earth.
"Parker Solar Probe and the team received a smooth ride from the Air Force C-17 crew from the 436th," said Andy Driesman, Parker Solar Probe project manager from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
"This is the second most important flight Parker Solar Probe will make, and we're excited to be safely in Florida and continuing pre-launch work on the spacecraft."
At Astrotech, Parker Solar Probe was taken to a clean room and removed from its protective shipping container on Wednesday, April 4. The spacecraft then began a series of tests to verify that it had safely made the journey to Florida.
For the next several months, the spacecraft will undergo comprehensive testing; just prior to being fueled, one of the most critical elements of the spacecraft, the thermal protection system (TPS), or heat shield, will be installed.
The TPS is the breakthrough technology that will allow Parker Solar Probe to survive the temperatures in the Sun's corona, just 3.8 million miles from the surface of our star.
"There are many milestones to come for Parker Solar Probe and the amazing team of men and women who have worked so diligently to make this mission a reality," said Driesman. "The installation of the TPS will be our final major step before encapsulation and integration onto the launch vehicle."
Parker Solar Probe will be launched from Launch Complex-37 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The two-hour launch window opens at approximately 4 a.m. EDT on July 31, 2018, and is repeated each day (at slightly earlier times) through Aug. 19.
Throughout its seven-year mission, Parker Solar Probe will explore the Sun's outer atmosphere and make critical observations to answer decades-old questions about the physics of stars.
Its data will also be useful in improving forecasts of major eruptions on the Sun and the subsequent space weather events that impact technology on Earth, as well as satellites and astronauts in space.
The mission is named for University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Eugene N. Parker, whose profound insights into solar physics and processes have guided the discipline. It is the first NASA mission named for a living individual.
Parker Solar Probe is part of NASA's Living With a Star Program to explore aspects of the connected Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. Living With a Star is managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Johns Hopkins APL designed, built and manages the mission for NASA.
Instrument teams are led by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.; Princeton University in New Jersey; and the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colorado, is the provider of the Delta IV launch service for Parker Solar Probe. NASA's Launch Services Program (LSP), based at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the agency's efforts to commercially provide rockets for specific missions. LSP also directs the overall launch effort including overseeing development and integration of the rocket with the spacecraft.
