“Every night I look up at the Moon and I see it and I get real excited because I can feel she’s calling us and we’re ready,” Nasa’s Lori Glaze told a news conference on Friday.<\/p>\n
“The excitement for Artemis II is really, really starting to build, we can really start to feel it. It’s coming.”<\/p>\n
The first rehearsal, which took place at the beginning of February, ended early because of a hydrogen fuel leak at the launch pad.<\/p>\n
Glaze said issues including with seals and filters had now been remedied.<\/p>\n
“Yesterday we were able to fully tank the SLS rocket within the planned time line [\u2026] we also succesfully demonstrated the launch countdown,” she said.<\/p>\n
Three Americans – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch – and one Canadian, Jeremy Hansen, make up the Artemis II crew.<\/p>\n
Glaze said the crew were excited following the successful rehearsal and would go into quarantine later on Friday.<\/p>\n
They’ll begin their journey on Nasa’s mega Moon rocket: the 98m-tall (322ft) Space Launch System, or SLS.<\/p>\n
It’s only flown once before in November 2022 for the Artemis I mission, but this was with no people onboard.<\/p>\n
The crew will be strapped into the Orion capsule, which is located at the top of the rocket.<\/p>\n
The inside of their spacecraft is about the size of a minibus, and it’s where the four will live, eat, work and sleep during the 10-day mission.<\/p>\n
The first day of their journey will be spent in orbit around the Earth, then if all systems are working well, the astronauts will head towards the Moon.<\/p>\n
The voyage takes about four days, and the crew will travel around the far side of the Moon, which is the side we never see from Earth.<\/p>\n
They’ll be at a distance of 6,500-9,500km (4,000 to 6,000 miles) above the lunar surface, and will have several hours dedicated to studying and taking images of the Moon.<\/p>\n
After the fly by, the astronauts will begin their four-day journey home. They will end the mission with a splash down in the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Every night I look up at the Moon and I see it and I get real excited because…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-302835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}